The Harvest Moon Consortium

[lord rosenkrantz]

Sadly these days teaching is leaving me little time to spend working on tileset creation, but still I am managing to slowly bring a so-much-needed mountain tileset to life.

These are a few screenshots of the early stage the tileset is at (still need to add the raise/lower tiles, which will work as "high mountains" and peaks), but could be already useful to illustrate the approach I am trying to maintain.
The rocky mountain tileset available on the vault, apart being generally buggy and resource intensive, displays a few radical designing mistakes, which cause for example the awful seam between tiles due to the way nwn engine calculates the ambient and diffuse light values (in detail, it is necessary that at tile junction the edge faces of both tiles have a 180? angle, otherwise, since the engine doesn't seem to calculate the smoothing values across the tile junction, the scene lighting creates such an awful seam).
I have also considered that a mountain looks more natural if it's built as a combo of nude rock and grassy patches and areas, hence the designer choice you can see in these screenies.
So all in all I decided to build a new tileset from scratch, with new models and very high resolution textures. So far, the magnificent OMB's Clean Models utility doesn't find any mistake or bug ^_^

Well, more screenies and comments/explanations to come, as the work will progress


[IMG]http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e216/lord_rosenkrantz/Rocky%20Mountains/th_mountains_alpha_01.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e216/lord_rosenkrantz/Rocky%20Mountains/th_mountains_alpha_02.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e216/lord_rosenkrantz/Rocky%20Mountains/th_mountains_alpha_03.jpg[/IMG]

[Sherincall]

Pretty awesome. Actually looks as good as NwN 2


..Just, how walkable is the rocky part?

[WojtekPod]

It looks very good! I am looking forward to seeing it done.

Thank you for sharing the pictures, lord rosenkrantz! ^_^

WojtekPod

[lord rosenkrantz]

[QUOTE=Sherincall]Pretty awesome. Actually looks as good as NwN 2


..Just, how walkable is the rocky part?[/QUOTE]


As walkable as we want it to be!

From a technical point of view, the walkmeshes work perfectly and aren't more cumbersone in terms of resources than any other nwn1 walkmesh.

From a designing point of view, the grassy part is generally always walkable, while the rocky part is dependant on the steepness. The top of the rocky part is always walkable, assumed your char finds a way to climb the rocky walls or a passage to get to the top. <_<

I plan to soon release an alpha version of the tileset (only basic tiles, no variations or features, nor trees and such, but at least fully working when it comes down to paint terrains), so that everybody who bothers to test the tileset can also provide feedback


Anyway, I am happy you guys are liking it

[Chandigar]

Pretty sweet! I know what you're going through, I went through a lot of the same pains trying to do the mountains for the Aztec set. In the end I went with everything jagged to avoid the layer cake effect... but I can see the benefits of smoothing everything out when I look at your screenshots.

I'm working on a snowy mountain revamp for a friend's set at the moment and going through all of the pain again. Please keep up the good work and keep us posted with some screenies!

[lord rosenkrantz]

I recall when I first saw the mountains of your aztec tileset, Chandigar. I thought "now this IS a real mountain!" At that point I could only see the good sides of your approach, which were so different from the "rounded" mountains I had previously found on the vault. With time I though started to notice the drawbacks too, and when I started to plan my mountains I realized that whatever approach we choose, there're gonna be drawbacks, just because of the system nwn1 uses to paint down terrains.

You are perfectly right about the smoothing, I am using it massively to obtain a natural look and to balance the fact we must use low-poly models to prevent the tileset to become too resource intensive. The drawback is that I lose the beautiful "edgy" appearance of your mountains.
Hence, there is need of workarounds. One is the texture used for the rock: its internal design must be as "edgy" as possible, to make up for the smoothed models. Another workaround is to add tile variations in which the rocks look much more roughly cut than in the "rounded" tiles. Another workaround is to add a crosser that paints down and replaces the "rounded" tiles with "raw" rock.
Sames apply to the awful layer cake effect. Beside designing the tiles in a proper way to minimize the issue, I am going to use an extra crosser as workaround for it, which can join different layers of tiles while removing the edge seam.



I know it's a lot of work, but I knew since day one that it was an ambitious project, as it's an attempt to put together the versatility of the rounded mountains with the beautiful looks of "edgy" mountains like yours.

I won't give up easily, and your sympathy makes easier to keep up

And don't give up yourself with your snowy revamp

[Tristan Kalaman]

Looks awesome!

Hopefully this will get rolled into the CTP!

One source, one solution!

Thanks for the support LR!

/Tristan.

[Primogenitor]

Wow, that looks really good

[Tristan Kalaman]

[QUOTE=Chandigar;33044]Pretty sweet! I know what you're going through, I went through a lot of the same pains trying to do the mountains for the Aztec set. In the end I went with everything jagged to avoid the layer cake effect... but I can see the benefits of smoothing everything out when I look at your screenshots.

I'm working on a snowy mountain revamp for a friend's set at the moment and going through all of the pain again. Please keep up the good work and keep us posted with some screenies![/QUOTE]

I just went and checked the Aztec hak (version 1.3 redux) and I have to say I really like the idea of using "impassable brush" in the forest. That would actually be a nice addition to the forest terrain tileset so you wouldn't have to use the rock ledge as a blocker on the edge of the map. I don't like leaving large exposed map edges where it makes it tough to find the AT.

And did I say how wicked awesome the mountains look, LR? I was just re-reviewing the images and wow! ^_^

/Tristan.

[lord rosenkrantz]

Two more screenshots to celebrate the completion of both high (rocky) and low (grassy) hills. Next step is going to be the addition of tile variations, then once done, I'll add the raise/lower tiles, i.e. high mountains/peaks, then I'll proceed to add vegetation and similar

[IMG]http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e216/lord_rosenkrantz/Rocky%20Mountains/th_mountains_alpha_04.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e216/lord_rosenkrantz/Rocky%20Mountains/th_mountains_alpha_05.jpg[/IMG]