Merricksdad's Black Hills Tileset (First Look)

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               

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.

 

Apologies if I'm being dense (coffee has not "taken" yet), but what is it you'd want the plugin to do, exactly?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

A variety of caustics plus slide, over at least 64 frames. In addition to caustics, some wave, lava flow, and maybe a swirl. I can't seem to get the slide to work the way I want it to when used in addition to various water-like functions.

 

Edit:

 

Actually I have a huge bitmap class library I built when I was working on the infinity clone. If I could just get the math for caustics, I could programatically build any type of flowing water I needed, any time. I think I might try that instead. Simple translation is, well ... simple. So is making frame sheets. Pixel poking just takes math.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_3RavensMore]

               

Just looked at your sample of module.  For someone who knows nothing of the techniques you use for this, I love it so far.  It does seem to move a bit insanely fast though.  What are you planning for streams that enter larger bodies of water?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I figure for steams that enter larger bodies of water, I'll just duplicate the texture, slow it down, and display it at a different opacity. I also have some sea foam images I'd like to animate. Not really sea foam -- I took a bunch of stills at different times of the year down where our municipal water cleaner empties into the river. The various pictures give me hundreds of textures to play with just for that point in the water. I also have a bunch of pictures from the dam and fish ladder at Grand Ledge. That area also is the municipal outlet point, so it has a bunch of cool textures to give. Around here, natural steams and rivers entering a larger body of water doesn't even swirl in the slightest, most of the time. So I gotta kinda fake it and hope it looks real for mountain streams. Most of the reservoirs I've been to in the mountains, the water has slowed down so much before it enters the main body, that it doesn't do much there either. On the other side of the dam, that is a totally different story. To tell you the truth, I don't even know what it should look like, and when. I've only seen churny water meet a larger body after a great storm. And that isn't proper, because it's all pudding-like with mud and debris.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I don't know if I mentioned this before, probably not, it's kinda scary, but the poly count on the non-shadow mountains and streams is getting up there. I have only one tile that takes a second to load, and that is a full -S- curve in the river. I've made a mistake in that one, and I'll probably start completely over with it. That tile's water plane alone has probably 1000 faces, all using an the animated water. Just wanted to point out how much can be done with tilesets as long as you keep the shadows under control with lower poly secondary meshes doing all the shadowing.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Took a break for a bit while I search through the world wide texture repository '> Instead of pushing harder to finish the water series, I need to first go back and work on half height terrain. I wasn't sure I was going to need it, but I really do. It will be a starting point for stuff like this below, as well as glaciers for the winter subset. By subset, I mean the winter variety of this won't be a separate tileset, but will be mixable with this one. I want you to be able to have a snow covered mountain area in the middle, or edge, and as you progress further from that downhill, you can naturally transition to non-snow-covered mountain. That naturally leads into the glacier bottoms being properly represented, as well as the upper treeline crosser. Half-height terrain should make everything more natural and smooth, as well as supply those much needed ramps to climb these 45 degree (or steeper with carve/erode/fluff/dilate crossers) mountainous slopes.

 

So here is what you'll be seeing first with the half-height terrain:

 

 

 

And here is what I am ultimately going for with base terrain and streams:

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Rolling hills basics are done, as well as crossers with raised terrain, give or take a few seam math issues.

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Killmonger]

               

'>

 

MD......Just "wow".......Really outstanding.....Thank you in advance.....

 

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_YeoldeFog]

               

Looks really good! Tempting to build again!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Looks really good! Tempting to build again!

DO EEEET!

 

Seriously, if you can, then do. If you enjoy it, then do. The community wants it. That is a given.

 

You new people watching this! You can do this too. It really isn't that hard. And you have lots of people willing to help. Even if that help is just pointing you toward the older documents bin. A special someone made that bin easier to read a while back, and it really is a good resource.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_rjshae]

               

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.

 

It looks good. The one thing I'd say is that most streams aren't actually blue like that; at least not the ones I've seen around here. Most are a steel gray fading to dark brown. Supposedly tropical water is blue because the water is warmer and holds less oxygen, ergo fewer microorganisms.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Ah, but this is a mountain stream, and by the time it is actually finished (because you are pointing out parts of a prototype), the texture will be recolored and re-alpha-ed to match the scenario (which still doesn't have a stream bed texture picked out). Check out the stream and grass above, on which I am basing the tileset (about 6 posts back). That water has a brown/green tint and reflects blue sky. The reason for that is that the underlying rock is covered with algae, so that is the color you see through the water.


Yes, the color of the water is based mostly upon what is in it, but also how much of the sky is reflected. Mountain glacial water appears very blue, but only at depth, and is still clear in small quantities. Same with Caribbean ocean water. Geyser basin water in Yellowstone ranges from red, through yellow, green, and dark dark blue, but again, in a white cup, that is still clear. Most water around me is green, and sometimes that stays even in small samples (ick). The rivers here where I live usually flow brown with a green tint, never clear, and you can see the particles when in a white cup. Stagnant water in our ponds and springs is sometimes black at depth, and extremely clear at the edges.


Basically, what I am saying is, you have to find a texture which matches your finished tileset. I would never use only a blue texture for anything but a frozen landscape. The water above, while used as a flowing river in TL2, is actually ocean water, probably on a gray/stormy day. if you watch it, you can see one spot in the texture actually has a shoreline wave in it.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Having an idea today. Maybe two. Maybe three.

 

Watching the sparkle of frost on the snow, trees, and glass...I think I have a way to make that kind of sparkle on textures in NWN. Let's see what I come up with.

 

Second idea: this is a wonderful day to get some frosted spruce foliage shots. By the way, I've got a few pine foliage textures to dish out that I think we'll all enjoy. Unlike with deciduous trees, some of the pine species keep the same "leaves" on their previous growth. Some up to 6 years on this property. So what I did was take a few branches of stuff people used for christmas trees and wreaths, and I cut it into sections, placing each section into the year-worth of growth it had seen. I then took whiteboard shots of all 6 years the foliage stayed on the branch. With the proper texture application algorithm, I can pull from those texture plates enough content to furnish a wide variety of spruce and fir trees. Anything older than 6 years gets the young or old bark texture applied instead. This should be fun.

 

Third Idea: I was playing Kingsroad (facebook game) last night, and one of my item sets gave the overall appearance of my character a special environment map. But instead shininess, it was actually a texture overlay. I had previously been doing texture overlays to dream up new weapon effect methods. The cool part about that weapon overlay was that it was just a golden lightning bolt texture with animesh properties, dragging the texture across the model surface. We could do that with txi cycle textures easily. Just not as easy to do on multipart player models.

 

Anyway, let me work on sparkly snow today and see what I come up with. It should be interesting, if smoothing doesn't destroy it.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Meh...not what I was really after. Took a lot more work than I had planned, but it's easy now. Ok, here is what 200 frost crystals looks like across a 20m square of snow.

 

 

Each individual frost crystal is a single face. That face is randomly rotated in all three dimensions, so they sparkle as you walk past them. If you bring light, more angles sparkle at the same time. Kinda cool. Not spectacular. Increase the count and you increase the engine use. But it does look cooler as you upscale.

 

And yes, that is the mirror placeable in the background. He was my helper today.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

Watching the sparkle of frost on the snow, trees, and glass...I think I have a way to make that kind of sparkle on textures in NWN. Let's see what I come up with.

 

​Yay! I have been toying with the idea of asking if this is possible and if so how. If you do manage it that would be great. As the placeables of mine that I am thinking of have fully transparent areas and translucent areas, would it be possible to limit the twinkle/sparkle to just the translucent part?

 

TR