287 réponses à ce sujet

[Rolo Kipp]

<digging...>

 

Two root placeables in the 1.69 patch:

tnp_groot & tnp_groot2

 

<...not so deep>

[MerricksDad]

Well I never knew how hard it would be to take stock photos in Michigan. I already knew about washout in bright light, and my camera doesn't do dark very well, so the few overcast days I got early on tricked me into thinking foliage would be easy.

 

Nope.

 

South dakota washes everything out, so I had to purchase a secondary uv filter to assist the internal one. In Michigan, blue is just another shade of gray, so I assumed no washout. So wrong.

 

And then there are tornadoes and stuff....

[MerricksDad]

[3RavensMore]

Morels!  Yummmmmm!  We never find them around here anymore. 

[MerricksDad]

I suspect my days of finding these are numbered. We are almost out of elms and MSU has not (to my knowledge) made any public progress on their resistant elm varieties. The ones in our Fitzgerald Park seem immune, but I wonder if that also makes them immune to other symbiotic fungus, or visitors like morels. Either way, we are probably going to lose more than one species here over this.

 

Related Article:

 

http://msue.anr.msu....rban_landscapes

[henesua]

will those mushrooms grow on exotic elms?

 

I like Ulmus parvifolia and while the Siberian (pumila) is not considered a good tree by many, I also like that one as it is an impressive tree when full grown. I find the siberian's character and color picturesque in contrast to the beautiful parvifolia with its warm tones and puzzley bark pattern.

[MerricksDad]

I can't find enough published information about specific non-wild michigan species to give you any ideas about growing morels. All I know is what I see personally and what I have read from those generous enough to document their findings and release it at our various mushroom festivals.

[henesua]

Apparently morels are not necessarily specific to ulmus americana, other ulmus and fraxinus will do for morels. We do have morels out here that aren't on these genus of trees as well.

 

I think you'll be able to find morels in the future, but maybe not the ones which are currently associated with your specific elms.

 

A co-worker mushroom hunts and she has gathered morels out here before. So I picked her brain on this one.

[MerricksDad]

Yes but first we need spores from those species to visit this area, or to buy dry morels of those species and just make it happen.

I also spotted for the first time in my life the Half Free Morel. They'd been pissed on by deer by the smell of them, so I didn't bother cooking them while I identified them. But I will be drying their caps and letting them ride my pack into the woods to further their species from my elevation. They aren't the best mushroom for quantity of flesh, but I bet a non-pee flavored find would be worth eating if found in a timely manner after it sprouted. I noticed they were growing where I wouldn't have expected these michigan yellow morels to grow. We simply need more variety back in lower michigan again, and to counteract these invasive species plants the gardeners of the last century have dumped on us. I've never even seen a tamarack and the place where I grew up used to be a tamarack forest.

[MerricksDad]

Last year (or year before, losing my mind) I picked up some tiny gray morels that were growing out of an area dominated by maple and hemlock. Those were tasty!

[kalbaern]

Last year (or year before, losing my mind) I picked up some tiny gray morels that were growing out of an area dominated by maple and hemlock. Those were tasty!

Morels seem to do pretty well underneath old apple trees in abandonned orchards and even beneath grapevine (cultivated ones).

[MerricksDad]

The patch I have been using the last 3 years is a mixture of white pine and elm surrounded by ash, and malus and crataegus apples. It is about 2 feet above the swamp water line. It holds a lot of water but warms slowly, which puts the date of appearance at or around the second full week of may each year. It only produces medium to large yellow varieties and smaller yellows with a slight gray tinge. All of the ones found in the pine needles are usually red at least on one side, probably from another fungus. We've got a ton of ash borer and DED around here, as well as near instantaneous transferrence of cedar/apple rust from red cedar and spruce to the various apple species around here. Other than that, our fungal species here are limited to orange and black slimes, or side-saddle type mushrooms on trees, or honey fungus at the bases. We occasionally see a black stinkhorn.

One of our county parks has two rings of red capped amanitas, and one stand of yellows. It also has a river walk which rarely sprouts a single white morel. That's the same park I got the tiny gray morels under the hemlocks.

A few towns away are some old apple orchards that were cut down after the water table changed and swamped the area (back to normal). It also has a lot of elm. But there white morels just spring out of peoples yards, just like up in our mushroom rich Mesick, Michigan, where they grow just feet off the main street without need for trees of any kind to consume.

[MerricksDad]

Nothing quite like grabbing onto a tree and realizing too late that the back side has black slime on it. Still better than being killed by a green slime I guess.

 

[Bannor Bloodfist]

I suspect my days of finding these are numbered. We are almost out of elms and MSU has not (to my knowledge) made any public progress on their resistant elm varieties. The ones in our Fitzgerald Park seem immune, but I wonder if that also makes them immune to other symbiotic fungus, or visitors like morels. Either way, we are probably going to lose more than one species here over this.

 

Related Article:

 

http://msue.anr.msu....rban_landscapes

 

Hmmm.... got completely lost on that site, all the various topics it has concerning various 'pests' for agriculture etc, and in particular regarding trees and the things that cause them to die off.  I have a HUGE chestnut tree in my backyard, that is slowly dying with some sort of disease.  I think it is a Chinese variety of chestnut, as this area of Pennsylvania had already suffered through the vast die off of the original American chestnuts. 

 

Anyway, thanks for the link, I think... if I can ever get my life back now as I currently have about 20 tabs open with various topics from that site!

[MerricksDad]

Information does that to a person

[MerricksDad]

Well, between the sunshine and the rain, I tried to snap some shots of some spruce foliage. It was difficult at first, but once I got the hang of it, with my white background tri-fold cardboard, the images were nice and clear and fit on the board perfectly.

 

But, after I started trying to chop the texture out, I ran into one issue with spruce: The bark color is so close to gray scale that I can't separate the shadow on the white board at the same time I separate the branch. Bla. I ran probably 50 different filter combinations to try and streamline the process but it wont budge. If I use those images it will require a bit of by-hand cutting or segregation.

 

So, I went back to the store and picked up hot pink and neon green poster paper to make "pages" for my tri-fold. I figure if I am taking pictures of something with dark bark, I can easily get away with just the white background. But for anything with a drab midtone branch, I NEED more actual green-screen techniques. For those things that are too bright green, I can use the hot pink. They didn't have bright blue, otherwise I would have just done that, which would be good for everything but the blue spruces and cedars.

 

This is actually getting more fun, the more things I try and learn. In the end, I think the textures I pump out for foliage are going to be on the quality of 2048 size (after cleanup from 2300). That will maximize my camera's power on the one axis, unless I switch modes to 3200. Either way, that only gives me the binary 2048 as the nearest value without purposely forcing loss. These should be very very very nice foliage!

[MerricksDad]

ok, finally progress. Here are some images of the first large spruce I made from JUST ONE camera shot on my whiteboard.

 

 

 

 

And that is a 2048 texture. So that is half the quality of most of the newer Skyrim foliage textures.

[3RavensMore]

Dare I say...that is effing spectacular!

[MerricksDad]

Breathing new life into NWN one seedy plant at a time

[Lord Sullivan]

@MerricksDad

Good texture. You know you really only need to make it 512x512 for it to look good in the game or if you insist on a little more refined go 1024x1024.

You should also add a "TEXTURENAME.txi" file with the following entry:

 

blending punchthrough
 

 

That will get rid of the edge transparency artifact you see around the leaves/branches in certain angels.

[MerricksDad]

I'll be releasing the textures at 2048 so others can make that decision for their games.

 

This one already has a txi file on it for sampling. But I will take a look at the blending type too. Thanks.

[MerricksDad]

Is this better?

 

[Lord Sullivan]

It good, however, the TXI option "blending punchthrough" takes care of the problem illustrated in your screenshot below. If you look at the branches right under the first two at the top, you will notice some kind of glossy, icing visual artifact on the branches.

 

ok, finally progress. Here are some images of the first large spruce I made from JUST ONE camera shot on my whiteboard.

 

[MerricksDad]

Those ones being the ones where the 2048 texture is shrunk down to the smallest values, so the most mixing is occurring. I see it now. I didn't go back and try that on the previous texture I had posted (page 7) but that had a TON of artifact in it, especially when mixed with fog and sky box. This one has no mixing with the skybox or fog, but I did notice it mixes with the gray rocks.

 

Edit:

 

Here's the original one of the low quality fir:

 

 

And here are the new ones showing no mixing with anything outside the mesh itself.

 

 

Which looks better up close, but not any better far away (just different), except with that hideous mixing with behind textures not matched to the scene palette. But it also takes the entire section with non-zero-non-one alpha and makes it opaque (or basically sets the alpha value to 1), which for many textures, wouldn't be what we would want, such as in foliage with a large transparency variety. So I gotta be careful about masks with that blend setting.

 

 

With the spruce texture I did today, the blending and related issues were not as noticeable before applying punch-through because the number of pixels spanning the range from alpha 0 to alpha 1 was only one pixel, or no pixels, spread out over 2048 pixels total. But the mixing issues on this above lower quality texture (the fir) is 5 to 10 pixels over only 256 pixels total. Huge difference that alone can make.

 

For these larger textures, the punch-through will work very nicely in clearing up that single pixel lining, thank you!

[MerricksDad]

Actually, now that I am looking it over, I can't tell if the output with punch-through is a round function or a ceiling function. Can you?

 

a1 = ceil(a0) would set all the values from 0.0# through 0.9# to 1.0, making even the slightest amount of texture print as whatever you have in your texture alpha region RGB values.

 

where

 

a1 = round(a0) would set all the values from 0.0# through 0.5 to 0.0, and values from 0.5# to 0.9# to 1.0, in which case it would clip the texture alpha region to nothing.

 

I can't tell at a distance what it is actually doing. Anybody know?

 

Edit:

 

I have to squint, but I think it is the ceiling function