287 réponses à ce sujet

[MerricksDad]

The ticks are out in force this week, which reminds me, I always wanted a giant tick from Temple of Elemental Evil. Anybody make one of those that does NOT move with the spider animation?

[MerricksDad]

I didn't originally see your comment about the girth. Here's a different variety of atlas which could give the larger portion of the trunk a better variety of detail, and which would make it so the front side and the dark side of the tree didn't have to share a texture. The numbers shown are based on a 512 image

 

[MerricksDad]

I've got a perfect opportunity tomorrow to explore and photograph a beech/oak forest. Hopefully I can get a lot of images of various spring plants, as well as last year's ice storm damage. I counted no less than 20 unique varieties of dead wood. Also spotted about 15 or so downed trees torn up at the roots. Many of the trees are over 3 feet wide, so the texture sizes of their bark types all the way up the tree should be of very high quality. I think I may get a few hundred shots of tree bases too. Many of them are very unique where they enter the ground, or have extensive fungal damage, moss clumps, or cavernous entries.

 

Up at the parking lot, I should be able to duplicate about half that in oak and fir specimens. Very excited.

[MerricksDad]

Well today was kinda stressful, and my camera battery didn't last as long as I had hoped. About half as long. But I did get a good quantity of photos taken. After I got home, I put together a new textures package or two and posted them to the new vault.

 

Set 1400 contains the 256 textures I made last week for playing around with my tree builder. They are very bright, likely too bright, for most of your uses in NWN. I personally make areas that are brighter and softer. If that is your style, you will enjoy pack 1400.

 

Set 1500 contains the new 512 or larger files I made today. Most of the textures are from my trip today, but many of them are from older trips in other states. I've tried to take the lighting down to a level more equal to vanilla content, but I left a lot of the rock and sand at a lighter value. Most of the wood images are of dead trees. I personally didn't have half enough dead woods texture for my previous forest tilesets. When I redo them in full, I would much prefer to have realistic looking dead wood.

 

I have not yet packed any foliage because I haven't fully decided how I want it for my own use. I'll mention it here when I do release that.

 

There is still so much more to take pictures of in just this town alone. I missed 90% of the beech/oak forest and barely scratched the surface of the mixed area, and got none of the landscaped play areas. So many species, and not enough hours in a day. And that is just one of our parks.

 

http://neverwinterva...s-texture-packs

[MerricksDad]

Today I hit up the pine and fir sections of the park. I'm uploading another 50 meg pack of textures. Many of the textures included fit nicely in the 1500 series, although some I have added to a 1600 series, which includes long thin strips. Many again are bark, but this time some of them have vines climbing the trees. There are also some foamy or rapid water images. I also found the edges of our old dam exposed in the soil, so I photographed them as saved them as granite wall blocks. There is also a tiny quantity of non-tree foliage in this pack.

[ShadowM]

Great stuff, I been looking over it and you got a good variety in it and I do not think they are too bright. I think you hit a good middle ground that can be easily manipulated in gimp or other programs to everyones preference. Reminds me I need to get out and take some more shots with my camera.

[MerricksDad]

No reason to stop now, that park has some good sycamore and some great boulders that box in the river. In the back 100, there are birch stands, spruces, and giant field stone piles. Let's see what I can find.

 

Oh and that reminds me, I have some of my textures from 2001 thru 2008 in another folder. It isn't the full list I used in any of my older tilesets, by any means (because unfortunately, hard drives are not immortal), but would anybody care to view them, as is, no proper naming schemes or anything? Many of them are color changed varieties, and/or are based on TNO textures, or combined with other textures to make something in between. Others, I have no idea where they came from and might be copyrighted material for all I know. I could pack them and let you all decide.

[MerricksDad]

New 158 meg package of random texture bits is up. I don't know how useful that will be, but take a look.

[rjshae]

More free textures are always welcome. Thank you.

[MerricksDad]

More fun adventures with a camera today. I took shots of japanese yew, ornamental beech, red pine, old spruce, and I also found a boat load of silicon chunks on the side of the train rails on the way home. Never seen that before! Shiny! My inner ferret wants to go back and pile it all in the car.

 

Edit:

Woot! Keep away from open flame!

 

Edit again:

Lighting as bad, I may need to work on these new textures for a bit longer. When I process them the same as yesterday and the day before, the contrast is so much it makes the dark regions go totally black. Bla

[rjshae]

If you happen to capture a good, hi-res, face-on shot of a spider web against a dark background, that would be useful. This is about the best I could find (under CC), but it's a bit blurry.

[MerricksDad]

we don't get good stuff like that this time of year

 

But does this edit make it better or worse for you?

 

or this one

 

[rjshae]

Yes that looks pretty decent. I'll give it a try and see how it works. Thank you.

[MerricksDad]

It stormed last night. Maybe now I can get some wet wood images. Maybe...right now...

 

But before I go, I am also now taking complaints and constructive criticism for the textures in the 1400-1500 range. I could care less about the 800 package.

 

If you have tips tricks, or lighting suggestions, let me know.

 

I've come up with an idea for taking better foliage pictures, which includes me buying one of those large poster board things. The one with the foam core and a white posterboard paper on the outside. I have no idea what that stuff is called. If I put it on a stick and then slip it behind the foliage I am trying to shoot, maybe I can get an instant masking color and get some perfect foliage shots. Worth a try.

 

 

Oh, one more thing: what is your take on using cube mapping to do textures for topiary? I was thinking the small yew, tiny spruces, boxwood, towering white cedar, etc., might be best represented by a single shape rather than a bunch of leaf-branch faces.

[MerricksDad]

Minor addition to the nature textures today. The new pack 1500-D has some seamless foliage you can use to wrap simple geometric shapes. These are probably no good for single branch geometry, but are still useful. I'll probably show some concept models you can make with these textures later this week. They're great for things like birdnest spruce, or hedgerow shrubberies. And who doesn't need shrubberies? Make sure you bring your herring.

[MerricksDad]

I totally know I am getting carried away with these texture packages, but I gotta be out there anyway. It's mushroom season.

 

This morning another 30 meg pack contains oak, red pine, white pine, alder, birch, cottonwood, black cherry, silver maple, white cedar, elm (live and dead), poison ivy, lots of dead stuff, leaf and pine needle combos for ground cover, and a mossy rock decal my son really liked. Not much other than that yet.

 

Tonight I should have more, including: catalpa, black hills spruce, colorado blue spruce, a few types of young fir, dwarf alberta spruce, pin oak, black locust, black walnut, buckthorn, lilac, privet, boxwood, forsythia, amalanchier/saskatoon, red dogwood, man I think I could go on and on.

 

I think have just about expended the live species variety until I get some foliage shots ready for upload. I need to head to the store to make my outdoor backlight setup, then we can have some awesome branch variety of all these species I uploaded already.

[rjshae]

Some rotting wood textures might be useful as well. Fallen trees that are half rotted way; that sort of thing. Good for forest floor settings at least.

[Tarot Redhand]

@MerricksDad Don't forget that you can also get a lot of feedback on these textures of yours by releasing them on deviatArt as well as here. There are people on there that regularly release nothing but textures. There is a caveat to this however in that there is also the possibility that you will get zero comments on there.

 

TR 

[MerricksDad]

lots of rotten wood of all kinds in there. Stuff from wet slimy newt houses all the way up to still standing but very dead elm. There are also a lot of dead pines, dead maple, dead poplar etc. One of the trees, I can't even make out what it is, but it turns purple gray for a while and then petrifies. I think it must be the toxins from some fungus that preserves it. After like 30 years it turns into a paper husk of itself and then breaks down. Package E has a shot of it, although darkened.

 

See tx_bark1580

[MerricksDad]

Well I ended up getting a tri-fold white cardboard setup, like you would buy for a presentation. I haven't gotten a chance to try it out yet because last night was too hot and bright for my camera to get any good shots, and today is all rainy. The lighting today would be great though to get some good mid-saturation shots.

Anyway, the only thing I see wrong so far with this setup is that I may not be able to shoot the branches top down with the entire branch in shot as I had intended. Too many of our trees around here are too rigid. But man, I really want shots of all these variable branches. We've got so many different pine species on the property and within a half mile from the complex, that there is just such a rich source of foliage shots to be had. My boy seems excited to help me with it. Maybe he can learn and retain some photography skills.

When it comes to older weeping-type fir trees, I may fake it and suggest bending spruce branches and folding them down the center of their poly plane, as many of the other users who make trees have basically already done. Too many of those firs have such a strange growing pattern that taking shots of their branches, except for the newest portion of any growing tip, would require side-on shots of both sides to make a proper unique-per-side branch texture. So what I do suggest is using some of the spruce textures, fold the plane you apply them to down the center, and then kinda make it hang gravitation-wise down the edges. I noticed on our larger firs here, the last years's growing tip is no less firm than that of a spruce, so after you fold and weep, then use another smaller variety of spruce yearling texture and append another model on the tip. Makes a perfect old weeping fir. Also, that is the same shape of a Norway Spruce.

 

 

 

Edit: Just to be clear, the foliage shown here is not mine, and it is very small for a foliage texture. It really looks like crap, especially where the alpha bleeds the fog through.

[3RavensMore]

Have you every considered doing Banyon tree placeables?  I'm thinking a half dozen placeables that can used to create a massive sprawling tree.  This might be unwieldy complex though with all the aerial prop roots and mass of roots and widely spread branches near the trunk(s).   Just a thought. 

 

[MerricksDad]

I've considered trying to make a lot of stuff, but that looks ... ... what word should I use ... complex maybe. Of course, I and many others have made some nice representations of willow over the years so it is certainly not impossible. If nothing else, some good transparencies might get the flowing root system done. That thing is a nightmare! Must be a relative of the ficus.

[MerricksDad]

With some more variety of textures of the fig roots, this could actually be fairly easy, the more I look at it. The top is nothing but a beech tree, and the bottom is nothing but a reverse tree with different growth pattern. It could be done either as another tree rotated on the x-y plane, or it could be done in columns of seamless textures taken specifically from images of this banyan. I see it is the tree of India, so it should be very common in high resolution images across the web. Crap, maybe my neighbors even have some photos I could check out.

[rjshae]

Are there any root placeables in NWN? They're pretty handy for adding atmosphere to underground tilesets.

[MerricksDad]

Most of the underground tilesets are deep caverns. You wouldn't naturally find such things that deep. But, say you wanted to have Host Tower roots coming into your underdark regions, then some larger roots would be pretty cool. If there was a nice shallow tunnel that was all dirt, like maybe a tunnel from an ankheg or something, that would look really cool with a variety of tree roots dangling down from the center.