Merricksdad's Black Hills Tileset (First Look)

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

Quick question with a yes no answer. Are you going to do some scree?

 

TR

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Yes


Definitely! '> Talus slopes are next on the to-do list, actually. They are my favorite place to rock hound! But as the original Legend of Zelda shows, you gotta watch out for falling rocks! ...Did anybody other than me think that those bouncing boulders in the original looked like giant boogers?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

After four versions, I decided that talus slopes might be best as an alternative to erode crosser. I may make scree piles a separate terrain at some point. Trying to make approximately 35 degree slopes up against 45 degree slopes is difficult, so I used the sharper slopes from the eroded set, with nearly maximized slopes. This also makes it look good when used with the dilate crosser. Not so much with the fluff crosser, because of the primitive ledges. Right now the walk mesh still hugs the original rock structure, but scree will be walkable in the final.

 

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Now that we've got a few flowing water textures, and have some more people starting to play with animesh, next on the agenda is directional streams and rivers. Yes both. I want to bring back my 2006-08 directional streams, and also make crosser-style rivers. This will be complete with basic waterfalls. More waterfalls will come later. I just want the prototypes out of the way first. I'll very likely do waterfalls to cross all my mountain-styling crossers. That added variety will make some great future cave entrances.

 

As I did with my streams before, I'll do right side and left side streams. Rivers will go up the centers, as most people use crossers. This will allow both right and left handed streams to merge easily to slightly larger rivers. Since they're directional, they'll merge from the side at acute angles, or possibly have some interesting groups to merge those various waters.

 

I won't make it now, but somebody may later: since I'll be doing directional flowing streams, you might want a backward flowing waterfall, like the one they tried to use in the DND cartoon.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

First look at the mountain streams.

 

I have a few issues with the moving water, but I'm getting there. The big issue is either 1) wrapping the texture flawlessly, or 2) using enough "stuff" to hide seams. This is only a problem when the streams split, merge, or widen.

 

In the image below, I've made a test split. This uses three sides of the tile with stream crossers.

 

 

I'm using the TL2 extracted water. This one is the tx_wateranim04, with TXI, as packed in that kit I put on the new vault. I've tiled it 4x4 to give it more detail per meter. This is 75% opacity. I may increase the frame rate to speed up the base water, but mesh stretching should supply the rest of the wibbly wobbly stuff I need to make it look real a it passes over rocks, or swirls at intersections.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

wibbly wobbly stuff

 

What? No Timey, wimey stuff? '> 

 

TR

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Still not very happy with the water. I did find out that the fps on that water is supposed to be 64. I didn't imagine that all 64 frames were supposed to play over only a second, but after setting it straight, the water is as real as can be for a stream in NWN (minus the shiny I can't see).

 

Still trying to figure out how to properly stitch flowing water of various angles so that the parts merge better. I mean it's good now, I just like it to be flawless, with no overlap on the transparent bits. Normal blending causes a mess with alpha and procedural cycles mixed together. My stream should not have chunks of ice floating in it unless that is exactly what I requested.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Frith5]

               

It will be obvious I don't know what I'm talking about here . . . but is it possible to have the 'end' of the stream dip slightly, so it goes 'under' the other end of the connecting stream? And if so, would that help at all?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I did try that, and with the alpha, it makes a big mess. With no alpha, it works great, but then you can't see into the water. I have a nice river bottom and edges all planned out, and I want to show that detail. I've also got big rocks to place, so you can see the water ripple over them, and know it is a rock under there. Without the alpha, it's just 1990 again.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_s e n]

               

when i did water for the terria tileset i (if i remember correctly) skinmeshed the texture so the uv could be animated and gave it about 50% opacity (not sure the exact value) and instead of make the water shiny (there was issues with transparency, or maybe applying a .txi file to the water texture made the toolset crash) i made the texture of the river bed slightly shiny. thats a good workaround and the effect wasn't bad at all. another thing: playing with a nodes hierarchy makes possible add some black mesh (with an alpha channel to fade out the colour) and by setting the opacity value for the mesh, it recreates the effect of the water becoming deeper using just 1 water texture, 1 river bed texture and 1 black (alpha channel) texture, given it is correctly uv mapped in max (you need to play with uv texture verts to get everything seamless, and this is time consuming especially when the river bends, same idea applies when animating the flowing water skinmesh uv values, and the most challenging thing is to create the flowing animation (for example) of a stream T crosser tile, where a river arm flows into another river. i made different water mesh layers with less opacity values, so if standard water was 50% i made 2 layers of 25% or whatever, that way i've been able to decelerate the flow speed and the overall effect was good even if i didnt manage to get the water of those T tiles streaming perfecty seamlessly (thats where a 50% opacitly value of the water helps in hiding seams)

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Spent some time reflecting over the contents of some animesh water, because I remembered there was a texture with colored blocks across the tile. Not sure who originally came up with the texture, but I made a brightly colored one of my own, so I could see it better in max.

 

 

I then modified the seam in such a way that I could drag the verts around, matching them up with the adjacent water branch. I then did the same in the tverts. A slight seam still exists, but nothing a few rocks and some plastic surgery cannot fix.

 

This is just one of the t-branches I've been working on. I think I have 8 (two varities of lefts and rights, with left and right sided streams...you'll see)

 

 

For all the other stream parts, I've applied a vertex noise of 20/20/40, which gives a really nice rolling water effect. The above image does not have that added yet. So no, the edge won't be that straight in the final. Ick.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

@s e n

 

I too had thought about modifying the river bottom so that it had shiny bits. I'm not a fan of metal shine, but I did find out that, with enough tweaking, I can place a secondary water animation as an overlay to the river bottom. Over half of the animated water I pulled from TL2 is actually footage of the bottom surface of a pool or something, not the top of the water. Combining the two makes a very realistic water. That being said, I don't have anything that works well with a rushing stream, just partially calm waters, like a pool. Not a total loss. Hard to really see the bottom of the river bed when water is foaming by. Just those really shiny rocks should stand out, and that is what I really intend for this particular stream.

 

As you did, I've also used the black texture to darken the water bottoms. I plan to move that into the river systems when I get the bottom texture and edge textures picked out. Much texture shopping to do! For the shallows and deep water, I used a 0-255 transparent gradient, where the top of the texture strip is 100% transparent, and the bottom is full black. I then applied the texture to any bit of water with a 510cm* deep uvwmap cube, positioning the top of the cube exactly with the top of my water level (gmax modifier instances are a life saver). Anything deeper than 5m needs to have a different overlay, but I haven't gotten to that point yet. Haven't run into any place I need deeper than 5m water.


*Just so everybody knows, the extra 10 cm is for avoidance of the texture edge. If you pain a mesh with the exact dimensions of the mesh, there will be blurring (depending on vid card and texture settings) at the edges of your texture swatch when it gets repeated. In my situation, that would carry the full black bottom to the full-trans top, making a black line around the water edge.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Same tile with Seam-away^tm applied!

 

 

Before the final, anything along the edges that looks wonky will be covered with decals and details, like river rocks. Also, pre-applying the rolling water effect I mentioned above gives me the ability to determine where on the tile river rocks and edge debris should go. The higher the roll, the more likely I'll be placing a rock near it. The worse the edge dips or raises, outside of the defined water area in the walkmesh, the more likely a decal or detail object goes there. More like making happy trees from those mistakes, than trying to fix the mistakes in detail.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               

Over half of the animated water I pulled from TL2 is actually footage of the bottom surface of a pool or something, not the top of the water. Combining the two makes a very realistic water.

 

FWIW, those types of images are done with a "caustics generator".  The free version of  this isn't too shabby.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Thanks OTR.

 

Still trying to find a decent flowing water plug in for gimp. I've been trying to make my own, but the outcome isn't great so far. I'd like to be able to pre-render a lot of flowing stuff and let others play with it too.

 

There are also a few caustics plugins for gimp. Also some gimp tutorials I found about lavas and caustics on deviant art. Modifying those slightly gives various results.