Merricksdad's Black Hills Tileset (First Look)

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

7-8 more wildflower varieties added to the kit.

 

Decided to make the chasm terrain accept crossers, based on pictures from Harney Peak looking down. You can now use pine, spruce, aspen, or granite spire crossers to fill the chasm to an extent. That way when you look down in a far-fog setting, you will see tree tops instead of blackness.

 

Thinking about doing stream crossers in chasms now too.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

OMG I just found the most beautiful frozen lake pictures I could ever use for NWN

 

https://www.google.c...m/data=!3m1!1e3

 

https://www.google.c...m/data=!3m1!1e3

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

Is there an aerial picture of either lake view when the water is not frozen?

 

TR

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Look up Pactola Reservoir. You should be able to get some good shots of the water. Most of them will be side view looking at the front "island" and trees in the background.

 

Edit:

 

If you use google earth, you can change the date when the picture overlay set is taken. I think it gives you 4 varieties in some locations. I know I used that feature to detect issues with property I was thinking to buy. If should give you various top-down shots of this lake at different years and times of year.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Pardon me while I put off working on models until my new computer arrives. This one is now turning itself off if I look at the power cord incorrectly, and it is having fits of slowness that do not work well when moving mesh parts.

 

Hopefully I will be back in a week. It is scheduled to arrive by the 21st, but I expect it in a few days. It should have Win10 on it, so I may need some help from you new Win10 users if things go sour with GMax or any of my other editing software.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Since I don't dare work on anything in GMAX right now, especially since just today I shorted the power cord out twice and lost my work, I decided to just poke around with all the previous versions of the black hills tileset that I had posted pics from on here already. I really like where I was going with that stuff, but I think I need to remove a few of those crosser variants before I can really move forward with a more playable tileset. I was going to completely redesign everything from z-0 on up, but i've decided to skip that and just clone over most of the single and double high granite stuff I had done before. Most of the other things I had worked on, especially those deep cutting crossers, no longer fit the scheme I'm trying to do for chasms and streams. Everything else, including the water and river system I had before, will come directly to this new iteration before being finished.

 

My son goes back to school in about 3 weeks and I cannot wait. By then I will have the new computer fully set up and I can just go absolutely crazy with this. I feel a quick finish coming on soon, and it will be just the biggest relief I have had for a while (other than sending my kid back to school).

 

In the meantime, if anybody has personal pictures of the black hills area, specifically around mount rushmore and the surrounding granite core areas, pack those puppies in a dropbox folder and lemme see them! On top of my own photos, I've been perusing thousands of photos online, via google and google earth, looking for all the variety I can find. What I am mainly doing is taking top down photos from google maps and google earth, then getting 10-20m squares defined that I want to recreate. From there I make a variety of one of the 4 main tile types (0001, 0011, 0111, and 0110, where 1 is height change+1). Google maps and google earth have some good uploaded pictures with gps coordinates build right into them so I can get some pretty cool views of various stuff.

 

Too bad it just doesn't make me a tileset '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

Too bad it just doesn't make me a tileset

 

 

If google could make a single cent from it, it would 

 

TR

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Risked working on the granite lands tileset today. No blusters at all, thank goodness.

 

So far, I put together the jagged mountain areas from the previous attempt at a mountain set. I then took a hint from the "Coniferous Mountain Forest" and reduced the height from 1k down to 6oo.  Mountain forest was surprisingly only 300, and I love that set, it just doesn't fit my wants. Still, the low poly nature of it, and the quality of the trees, makes me so badly want to be done with these sets, so I can see my own newer work in action in people's stories. For some, it will be hard to beat that small tileset in its simplicity and quality.

 

After reduction, I tried a few alternate poly count granite regions, before finally accepting the original, and then hand modifying the edge mistakes my "granit-izer" script still creates.

 

Then I spent four hours looking at very nice images of the badlands area and some place called Devil's Bathtub in Spearfish Canyon. How did I not know that existed? Now I feel cheated by life a little bit '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

My new computer delivered this morning. It isn't much better than my old one, and cost 4x as much, but it has a better processor speed, memory, and I am getting an HD TV to replace its display with while I work at home. It is going to take some time to become acustomed to the new keyboard layout, but I think I am already starting to get it. Unfortunately, it is going to take me about a week to transfer all my libraries to this machine, including textures, code, models, backups, programs, etc etc. Why is the person PC upload speed to the hub so damn slow? I need a cable or something so I can do direct transfer.... would that even be faster? 8 gigs over wifi for a single directory with 32k files is taking 6 hours. This is 2015 dammit.

 

Anyway, I already installed NWN diamond on this machine, and it renders faster than my old one, which I am thankful for. As expected, I still do not have shiny water capabilities without a better video card, but that is something I can live without, and fake, especially with the stuff I am starting to do with env maps here and there.

 

I can't wait til my kid goes back to school now. I am going to have so much fun creating this fall. I also downloaded some more games on GOG, which I can grab resources from, and hope to clone a few of those out for use in NWN. Might as well.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

Be faster to create a couple of dvd's surely. USB memory sticks should be faster too. What about a USB HD? For a direct connection you will need a peer to peer network cable.

 

TR

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_3RavensMore]

               

MD, cabling both to a router would be enormously faster. 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I ended up trying a very short cable from the source to the router, and that improved the speed from 1MBps to 5. So I did both to the router and got up to 10. I then spent 2 hours trying to get direct connection between the two. They could see each other. The source could read the destination. The destination could not read the source. And the destination was not allowed to give the source write privileges. So I scrapped that idea and went back to two wires to the router. I think I got it all moved now. It took over 8 hours though.

 

I played League of Legends for a game tonight, and forgot to reduce my graphics settings so it didn't skip around and crap. Ended up playing smooth as a baby's butt, and never once had a skip, due to either graphics or wifi. Very nice computer. Glad I got it!

 

Also spent some time getting gmax set up, fixed (been broken since 2010 for me) and reconfigured some scripts while I was at it. Looks like it will be a breeze from here on out.

 

While waiting for transfers this morning, I downloaded hundreds of more textures, because I was bored. I'll be happy to see some of those make it to NWN.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Frith5]

               

Ain't it fun getting something new and shiny? '>


Now, about those Pictured Rocks in Munising . . .        man, those would make some great terrain in our old friend NWN. Just sayin'. '>​

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Empyre65]

               

When you are connecting 2 computers directly, there are a pair of wires inside the connector that have to be crossed (or use a special cable with those wires crossed already). I don't know which wires need crossed, but you could Google it as easily as I could. I learned that the hard way long ago when I got the wrong kind of cable (the special kind for direct computer-to-computer) to connect my computer to my router and it didn't work.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Ain't it fun getting something new and shiny? '>


Now, about those Pictured Rocks in Munising . . .        man, those would make some great terrain in our old friend NWN. Just sayin'. '>​

I totally agree, and spent some time the other day collecting those kinds of textures on google earth. Speaking of google earth, this computer runs that thing very nicely. I can pretty much hike my favorite trails in 3d now.