MerricksDad's Weapon-A-Day

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I totally know I am getting carried away with these texture packages, but I gotta be out there anyway. It's mushroom season.

 

This morning another 30 meg pack contains oak, red pine, white pine, alder, birch, cottonwood, black cherry, silver maple, white cedar, elm (live and dead), poison ivy, lots of dead stuff, leaf and pine needle combos for ground cover, and a mossy rock decal my son really liked. Not much other than that yet.

 

Tonight I should have more, including: catalpa, black hills spruce, colorado blue spruce, a few types of young fir, dwarf alberta spruce, pin oak, black locust, black walnut, buckthorn, lilac, privet, boxwood, forsythia, amalanchier/saskatoon, red dogwood, man I think I could go on and on.

 

I think have just about expended the live species variety until I get some foliage shots ready for upload. I need to head to the store to make my outdoor backlight setup, then we can have some awesome branch variety of all these species I uploaded already.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_rjshae]

               

Some rotting wood textures might be useful as well. Fallen trees that are half rotted way; that sort of thing. Good for forest floor settings at least.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

@MerricksDad Don't forget that you can also get a lot of feedback on these textures of yours by releasing them on deviatArt as well as here. There are people on there that regularly release nothing but textures. There is a caveat to this however in that there is also the possibility that you will get zero comments on there.

 

TR 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

lots of rotten wood of all kinds in there. Stuff from wet slimy newt houses all the way up to still standing but very dead elm. There are also a lot of dead pines, dead maple, dead poplar etc. One of the trees, I can't even make out what it is, but it turns purple gray for a while and then petrifies. I think it must be the toxins from some fungus that preserves it. After like 30 years it turns into a paper husk of itself and then breaks down. Package E has a shot of it, although darkened.

 

See tx_bark1580

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Well I ended up getting a tri-fold white cardboard setup, like you would buy for a presentation. I haven't gotten a chance to try it out yet because last night was too hot and bright for my camera to get any good shots, and today is all rainy. The lighting today would be great though to get some good mid-saturation shots.


Anyway, the only thing I see wrong so far with this setup is that I may not be able to shoot the branches top down with the entire branch in shot as I had intended. Too many of our trees around here are too rigid. But man, I really want shots of all these variable branches. We've got so many different pine species on the property and within a half mile from the complex, that there is just such a rich source of foliage shots to be had. My boy seems excited to help me with it. Maybe he can learn and retain some photography skills.


When it comes to older weeping-type fir trees, I may fake it and suggest bending spruce branches and folding them down the center of their poly plane, as many of the other users who make trees have basically already done. Too many of those firs have such a strange growing pattern that taking shots of their branches, except for the newest portion of any growing tip, would require side-on shots of both sides to make a proper unique-per-side branch texture. So what I do suggest is using some of the spruce textures, fold the plane you apply them to down the center, and then kinda make it hang gravitation-wise down the edges. I noticed on our larger firs here, the last years's growing tip is no less firm than that of a spruce, so after you fold and weep, then use another smaller variety of spruce yearling texture and append another model on the tip. Makes a perfect old weeping fir. Also, that is the same shape of a Norway Spruce.

 

 

 

Edit: Just to be clear, the foliage shown here is not mine, and it is very small for a foliage texture. It really looks like crap, especially where the alpha bleeds the fog through.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_3RavensMore]

               

Have you every considered doing Banyon tree placeables?  I'm thinking a half dozen placeables that can used to create a massive sprawling tree.  This might be unwieldy complex though with all the aerial prop roots and mass of roots and widely spread branches near the trunk(s).   Just a thought. 

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I've considered trying to make a lot of stuff, but that looks ... ... what word should I use ... complex maybe. Of course, I and many others have made some nice representations of willow over the years so it is certainly not impossible. If nothing else, some good transparencies might get the flowing root system done. That thing is a nightmare! Must be a relative of the ficus.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

With some more variety of textures of the fig roots, this could actually be fairly easy, the more I look at it. The top is nothing but a beech tree, and the bottom is nothing but a reverse tree with different growth pattern. It could be done either as another tree rotated on the x-y plane, or it could be done in columns of seamless textures taken specifically from images of this banyan. I see it is the tree of India, so it should be very common in high resolution images across the web. Crap, maybe my neighbors even have some photos I could check out.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_rjshae]

               

Are there any root placeables in NWN? They're pretty handy for adding atmosphere to underground tilesets.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Most of the underground tilesets are deep caverns. You wouldn't naturally find such things that deep. But, say you wanted to have Host Tower roots coming into your underdark regions, then some larger roots would be pretty cool. If there was a nice shallow tunnel that was all dirt, like maybe a tunnel from an ankheg or something, that would look really cool with a variety of tree roots dangling down from the center.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               

<digging...>

 

Two root placeables in the 1.69 patch:

tnp_groot & tnp_groot2

 

<...not so deep>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Well I never knew how hard it would be to take stock photos in Michigan. I already knew about washout in bright light, and my camera doesn't do dark very well, so the few overcast days I got early on tricked me into thinking foliage would be easy.

 

Nope.

 

South dakota washes everything out, so I had to purchase a secondary uv filter to assist the internal one. In Michigan, blue is just another shade of gray, so I assumed no washout. So wrong.

 

And then there are tornadoes and stuff....

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_3RavensMore]

               

Morels!  Yummmmmm!  We never find them around here anymore.  '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I suspect my days of finding these are numbered. We are almost out of elms and MSU has not (to my knowledge) made any public progress on their resistant elm varieties. The ones in our Fitzgerald Park seem immune, but I wonder if that also makes them immune to other symbiotic fungus, or visitors like morels. Either way, we are probably going to lose more than one species here over this.

 

Related Article:

 

http://msue.anr.msu....rban_landscapes