Merricksdad's Black Hills Tileset (First Look)

[Legacy_s e n]

               

I don't have nwn installed atm '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I don't have nwn installed atm '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy__six]

               

Ah man, I've copy pasted the same NWN folder between more hard drives than you've had hot dinners. Assuming we're only counting the last 48 hours of hot dinners and you're not living the life of luxury wherein you have a cooked breakfast, lunch and evening meal.

 

I like your approach to the edges anyway. Looks the business. If I'd complain about anything, it'd be that everything curves up to flatness towards the top. IMO the rocks should slightly go over the raise, and then dip down in an uneven, wiggly fashion with only a small irregular flat area at the very edge of the tile. But what do I know? '>

 

The texture really reminds me of my Wildlands textures in that it's uniformly a greyish brown colour and covered in pixel noise. There's some really great detailed shapes in that rock texture and I think it's a shame you can't make them out as well as if it was clearer.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I like your approach to the edges anyway. Looks the business. If I'd complain about anything, it'd be that everything curves up to flatness towards the top. IMO the rocks should slightly go over the raise, and then dip down in an uneven, wiggly fashion with only a small irregular flat area at the very edge of the tile. But what do I know? '>

 

I'm assuming you mean like this?

 

 

Most of the tiles round off to a flat spot only at the very edge of the tile. Anything else you see flat is unfinished, or waiting to be retextured, and then redecorated with details, decals, and placeables. Even in the image above, you can expect to see some vegetation, rocks, debris, maybe a bird nest, or even a spruce trying to force its way into the cracks of the rock.

 

That image is from the top of the world. Well maybe not the tip top, especially since it is only 20m up.

 

Flat areas commonly exist in the black hills because of its age. The feldspar is on its way breaking down to clay, and the quartz and mica to sand. The shallow topsoil is made of dead grass, pine needless, and squirrel ****. Other places, such as mines, have wide open flat spots composed primarily of crushed granite.

 

The texture really reminds me of my Wildlands textures in that it's uniformly a greyish brown colour and covered in pixel noise. There's some really great detailed shapes in that rock texture and I think it's a shame you can't make them out as well as if it was clearer. Also keep in mind that the pictures I am showing are almost entirely taken from a distance and the texture is downsized for blending. Up close it is very much different.

 

I had tried a texture with darker lines, but when you shine the light on darker lines up close, especially on a rock with actual seams in addition to implied seams, it simply looks like crap, in my opinion.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy__six]

               

Oh, heh, guess I didn't look carefully enough (or the screenshot was at a bad angle). Looks much cooler than I thought. As for the texture, I don't mean darker lines per se, just that less pixelly noise would probably look better.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Less? I though you didn't like the previous version because it was pretty much washed out '>


I'm not really trying to go for a smooth look, as the rocks I played on around the black hills area were all very grainy. Even the most weathered stuff has three primary constituents, all of which weather at different rates, which leaves the surface of most boulders and outcrops very sharp. Physically rounded stuff, like where people walk all the time, are very slippery when wet, and have almost no texture. But, the black hills is almost entirely chemically weathered, at least the granite part. Hell, try mechanically weathering a chunk of near-solid glass the size of Delaware and you won't get very far very fast.

 

The lower areas, comprised mostly of sedimentary rock, has a lot more angular chunks of various colors, and I intend to add those as separate terrain at a later date. Those will have much more smooth appearances, such as red-brown sandstone, limestone of three different colors, and dark shale. I'll also be tossing in some placeable gneiss and silvery mica schist, which you can bank up against the bottom of outcrops to give it a metamorphic flavor. Other users can recolor those as wanted. I might even use my sparkly snow idea from page 4 to make the ground more like Keystone SD, where red garnets litter the ground anywhere the mica schist has weathered.

 

I love that area! I want to live there again someday.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy__six]

               

Heh my only complaint is all the pixelly noise. I wouldn't read too much into it

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Just finished the fluff crosser mods. Here's a look at a mostly fluffed mountainous area. For _six I also took out the ambient light color (now using 128 gray), so you can see what it would look like under purely white light. Full white (255 gray) looks like crap, as expected.

 

I love the rim around the rock edge!

 

There are still a few tiles which are offset by .02 cm, so I gotta go back and manually find and fix those. At least one tile is making a see-through crack in the floor. Nobody likes that. My kid calls it balloon world, since you can see it is hollow. He then runs off saying there is a crack in his room and he has to go save Amy Pond.

 

The fluff crosser pushes the walkable region at the top of the tile out about 50%, making the steepness of the slope quite a bit sharper, but providing a lot more flat walkable area at the upper region.

 

While the carve crosser was interesting, I fear it won't survive through the process of all this billowy rock addition. What I might do is modify the carve crosser to simply push the bottom walkable area back 50%, so as to create the opposite of fluff. Just like I've designed the dilate/erode crossers to be the opposite, I think the carve/fluff combo will be more useful as a working pair.

 

For those of you who are already playing with this in the toolset, you'll notice that the carve crosser can also be used on raised portions to cause their center to once again touch the previous level down, or if used all the way across the tile, it cuts a path through the rock. I want to keep that functionality, but possibly increase the useful width of the chasm.

 

Also coming up, I have the actual chasm terrain in process. Unlike the carve and raise features, the true chasm terrain will be a serious pit to nowhere. I won't be adding on-tile fog down in the pit, as I prefer that the tileset furnish that as needed. This also leaves open the ability to create a new skybox where the bottom of the skybox texture is a little town far below, or a forest as viewed from up on high. One might ring a mountainous area with the chasm terrain instead of the base grass, so that the player feels like they are on the summit of a tall mountain. Old super nintendo games were good at portraying that feeling, even on 16 bit color. Games like Lagoon and Final Fantasy 4 (II in US) had at least one scrolling background which worked as great at making the player feel as if they were far up above the world.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_3RavensMore]

               

 Full white looks like crap, as expected.

 

*squinting*  The magic eightball says...  "No it doesn't."  You almost sound like your channeling me in regards to...er...other things I'm associated with.  It doesn't look as good under white like, but crap?  Not even close.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

*squinting*  The magic eightball says...  "No it doesn't."  You almost sound like your channeling me in regards to...er...other things I'm associated with.  It doesn't look as good under white like, but crap?  Not even close.

 

No, I mean the image above is a colorless true gray: 0 hue, 128 gray, or half-luminance. Full white, 255 gray, 100% luminance makes it look terrible. With full white, there is no shadowing on the faces, and even up close, you cannot tell what is up and what is down, and it also makes the texture look like repeating noisy junk.

 

I'd never really played with high luminance values on the sun color before. I had no idea it could get that bad. No wonder the default environment selection have very little luminance, and low saturation.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Draygoth28]

               that screenshot says it all. Very impressive work and can't wait to see more.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Gotta run my taxes today, but after that, I should have a few hours to finish the already-existing crosser types. Maybe I can pack and release again.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Draygoth28]

               That would be great. Can't wait to check out the next version.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_rjshae]

               

While looking over the screen shots, I was thinking to myself that some of the topology would also work pretty nicely for an underground tileset as well.

 

Are you going to include some large overhangs, climbing chimneys, and natural cave openings? Just curious... '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

There will be at least 10 cave openings and/or mine entrances. I'd like to include some pits as entrances too.

 

For overhangs, I want to stick to groups to portray those. In the last version of this tileset, i had made overhangs a crosser, which I didn't really like. With a group, I can be more detailed, and make it more fun.

 

I went ahead and ran the processes on the current carve crosser. It isn't as ugly as I had suspected, but it leaves no room for walking in the cracks of the tiles. I think I will keep it, since they are already made. I'll probably just make another crosser type to do the walkable crevices I had intended.

 

Here's a shot of what you can now do with the carve crosser.

 

 

As before, you can carve any combination of the four edges. Instead of creating two jagged surfaces, it now chisels off a section and weathers it separate from the parent rock. In a few cases, this makes a really nice loose boulder. On others, it makes a cool double ridge, as can be seen just south of Keystone SD, as well as within the city limits of Custer SD.