medieval Rural by Zwerkules

[Legacy_NWN_baba yaga]

               hi,

I´m writing this having the toolset fired up and navigate on your wonderfully crafted set. Right now i zoom in and out your coast area and it´s beatifull, the layered cliffs are nicely implemented and shows your love for the detail and easy use for builders too. Different heighlevels actually matter in this case;) Now i check out the other goodies...

The halfling houses are lovely crafted with their rounded shapes and the doors and windows in the hills.... hobbiton..... But now i notice your grass ground texture isnt the best one when it comes to tiling you know. It´s to repetitive imo with that brown bump you see zoomed out in isoview. But that aside it looks like i imagine a halflling village;)

Ha I love your hill area. But again that brown bump takes away from the overall beauty. The texture seems to absorb the feel for the heightness here w/o proper shadows.

Nothing else to say about the elfhouses as they are perfect!

In your lighthouse area i can see what a builder is capable of to build. The great cliffs and trees add to the complete and natural terrain and everything for rural scultping is in this tileset! Love the waterfall btw.

So 10 points from me with the suggestion to rethink your grass texture or the way you tiled it. Maybe you cut out that brown bump and use it as a splotch only on 1/4 tiles. Great work '> Every tileset needs more then one level of raise/lower!!!

When i test it more ingame for bug hunting (if any) will add here.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par NWN_baba yaga, 28 juin 2012 - 12:50 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <tooting...>

Rural tileset with elven and halfling houses

Awesome!

<...someone else's horn>
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Rolo Kipp, 28 juin 2012 - 03:40 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_NWN_baba yaga]

               Well yeah... i forgot the link lol! thank you rolo;)
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Zwerkules]

               Thank you for your comments, Baba Yaga!

You are right about the grass texture, but there is only so much detail I'm going to take from a texture to make it tileable. A completely green texture will tile perfectly, but look bad. Just adding a few dark dots like in the Bioware grass texture will also produce no visible patterns, but I hate the Bioware grass texture with a passion.'>
The brown parts on the grass texture are too big. But even very small variations in colour always show patterns when you see a lot of tiles at the same time.

So I had to find a compromise, because I don't want to remove all the detail on the grass texture.
I removed the big brown parts, but left in some small colour variations, like brown, darker green and a little yellowish green.
The patterns are only visible where the 3d grass ends and if there's a lot of grass seen from high above. They are of course still visible in the toolset.


               
               

               

                     Modifié par Zwerkules, 28 juin 2012 - 04:52 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_NWN_baba yaga]

               I see how your grass prevents the effect. Very different from only the toolset view;) Anyway great work. and what in gods name is that huge waterfall behind your PC? I must have overlooked that big one:D
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Zwerkules]

               That huge waterfall is a river flowing down 2.5 meters twice and then 5 metres at once.
At a later point I'll add a 7.5m waterfall.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_s e n]

               have to check this out, after the football match '>
its this the one you be adding mountains or in the city one?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Zwerkules]

               This is the one that will have mountains.
The city tileset will only have city additions like castle terrain and docks while the rural additions will go into this tileset.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy__six]

               I'm guessing you're aware that the half level grass on all sides tiles aren't raised? Thought I'd raise that issue just in case.

Otherwise I'm quite liking it. Though I'm secretly hoping you make it a bit more different looking from TNO than it is (sorry, I had to). Hopefully the mountains will cater to that.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par _six, 28 juin 2012 - 08:06 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_s e n]

               Wow i managed to give the test module a look and im impressed by the overall feeling, not saying the coolness of the houses (you have become a master in house modeling, yap!) and waterfalls!

i see a few texture mapping issues here and there, but nothing major
what i would change is the geometry of the spruce trunks, which they dont really taper at the highest point and create weirdness. i think some foliage doesnt have fade set on

another thing: with the grass terrain, i see some bad smoothing issue among adiacent tiles. not sure if you know or if you just decided not care of it, but there is a method (i think a LR discover) to solve the smoothing issue created by different vertex normals in shared edges: basically make a small stripe (ex 20 or 30 cm will suffice) in both the adiacent tiles where they meet, that share exactly the same normals (actually you can quickly do that by mirroring the stripe of a tile and merge it into the other). that way, all grass will look nice and smooth!! note: the vertex couples of the stripe need to get teh same (example) yz values if the edge moves along the y axis, anyway its easy just to open a tile of rocky mountains and look at it '>

oh and the bark texture (the white used in the hollow tree feature) looks it has a bit too much contrast in it, causing a slight pixelation stripe effect, i'd smooth it a lil bit

by the way, congratulations, its very very beautiful and promising tileset!! this evening i will try building some with it and report whatever bug i find
               
               

               

                     Modifié par s e n, 29 juin 2012 - 08:56 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Zwerkules]

               

six wrote...
I'm guessing you're aware that the half level grass on all sides tiles aren't raised? Thought I'd raise that issue just in case.

Thanks, Six, I wasn't aware of it because those tiles were a last minute addition which I hadn't tested yet.
There's also one of them (the pond) that should be a feature. There are too few of the tiles that are raised on all sides. I just copied a few from the chasm/cliff terrain. I'll fix the height of those tiles, make the pond a feature and add more tiles of that kind that don't have rocks on them, but also aren't completely flat.

s e n wrote...

another thing: with the grass terrain, i see some bad smoothing issue among adiacent tiles. not sure if you know or if you just decided not care of it, but there is a method (i think a LR discover) to solve the smoothing issue created by different vertex normals in shared edges: basically make a small stripe (ex 20 or 30 cm will suffice) in both the adiacent tiles where they meet, that share exactly the same normals (actually you can quickly do that by mirroring the stripe of a tile and merge it into the other). that way, all grass will look nice and smooth!! note: the vertex couples of the stripe need to get teh same (example) yz values if the edge moves along the y axis, anyway its easy just to open a tile of rocky mountains and look at it '>

I know the method, Sen, and have fixed a few tiles that way, but the fixes are not in the version that is on the vault.
The a05 tiles are especially bad and I started fixing them. The one with the many rocks on it (a31_03) was very bad, too. I already fixed that.

I guess there are alot of tiles which I haven't fixed yet because the bad smoothing isn't so obvious.
Another problem are the tiny sparkles along the edges of some tiles. Those appear in tiles based on DLA tiles because some of them have only four vertices along an edge while others have 8 or more.
But nobody complained about them in the TNO tileset, so maybe I can leave them the way they are.

I could have made every tile from scratch instead of using DLA tiles, but that would have been far too much work for one person alone.
Even without variations there are hundreds of tiles needed for all the possible combinations of the two grass terrains and the ridge crosser. I still have about twenty more to make and possibly some combinations I didn't think of yet.
I also still have to make the half height grass terrain work next to trees terrain and make raised trees terrain.

The mountain terrain will not be based on Bioware or DLA tiles this time. I already wanted to make a mountain terrain for the Arabian Nights tileset, but a month was not enough time for that, so I used the forest cliffs instead.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Zwerkules]

               

_six wrote...

I'm guessing you're aware that the half level grass on all sides tiles aren't raised? Thought I'd raise that issue just in case.

Otherwise I'm quite liking it. Though I'm secretly hoping you make it a bit more different looking from TNO than it is (sorry, I had to). Hopefully the mountains will cater to that.

I thought those tiles were okay, because I had seen that their height wasn't right without testing them. I wanted to fix them today and saw that I had already fixed them. I just forgot to put the fixed versions into the hak. The curse of old age. '>

I won't take DLA or Bioware tiles as a base for the mountains. I'm also thinking about a lake terrain because the shore of the water terrain which is based on Bioware tiles seems too steep for a lake shore for me.
If nobody minds I'm also going to change the roads. They are too flat and I'd like to use cobbled roads instead.
BTW they don't work on half height grass terrain yet anyway.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               Zwerk, are you talking about having an actual lake shore at which you can wade into the water?

I like that.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_SHOVA]

               I look forward to the finished set! Zwerk, go with cobbles, it will look amazing. Please if you get the chance, some bridges for this set could really be useful. A covered stone bridge would be nice, as well as a wooden one (hint hint)
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Master Jax]

               Amazing. As for the white thingies you mentioned about the DLA tilesets, I DID notice them and dislike them, but who would we complain to? And what kind of a douche would do so?

As for the rest, I am very interested in this. Your Medieval City tileset is a jewel, and this is so diverse and well done! The bushes, the plants, the grassrims, these little details are what makes it so great, same as the vines, textures and lots of details did on the Medieval City.

I second the cobble motion. Never liked the "muddy" roads.