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[KelvinNZ]

Hi all,

Just want to say that I have spent some hours trying to perfect the textures inside Outerra.

Feel free to pass comments.

I have reworked the following:
Rocks/mountains
Grass/Grass patches incl rock grass patches
Trees (only one kind so just recoloured slightly)
Sand
Snow

New
Replaced asphalt road texture
Replaced gravel texture
Added/tweaked foam texture
Removed (99%) tiling effect from grass (problem with my last attempt)











Hopefully this will make your "alpha" experience a little more "real".
Download here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/uuhtpen7mnuv84v/Custom_textures_v2.zip

[ZeosPantera]

Wow. Looks nice from afar. Can't test to see how it looks up close (damn 4890).

Posted it here as well http://www.reddit.com/r/Outerra/comments/16yp22/kelvinr_has_made_some_custom_ground_textures_with/

[KelvinNZ]

Initially I had a hard time deciding how to attack the textures because as you know there are 4 seasons and I was having a little bit of a hard time deciding what look I was going to go as there are very few texture ranges. So i decided on a autumn/spring look because that's my favourite time of year, so the grass tries to depict this in it's tone.

The mountain colour was causing me a headache trying to decide what colour I was going to make them given that in real life there are many types of rocky mountain colours so I went with a darker grey with a new texture to try to make it generic but fitting to the area. I guess that's what you get with only a few textures.

The most difficult thing is actually avoiding the tiling effect on textures, this can look awful as i have experienced. But. if done right it can also look very nice indeed.

I have seen how the fractal procedure has worked with the textures with some of the patchy grass areas, a very ingenious way to implement such a visual challenge to textures.

Depending on how far the Biome is away I could re-texture again if Brano or Angry pig want to magic an extra vegetation area 

[knorko]

Nice one! i always felt that the mountains felt a little too pale in bright day light. this one really does the trick

[cameni]

I need to get a world "rock map" somewhere, to get a variation in rock types. Rock color usually isn't visible from above and the commonly available datasets do not contain it. There should be a geological map or something like that, but probably won't be available globally in a usable resolution.

Before the biomes there probably will be another slight change in the textures, adding normal maps for them for better detail near the ground.
Apart from the textures and terrain mixer there are also other currently hidden parameters that modulate the overall color of the material - for example see how the grass is being colorized when you are farther from it.

IMHO, those rocks have an odd greenish tint.

[Bartolomeus]

That sounds great Cameni. I'm looking forward to the improvements with the biomes!

Marko

[KelvinNZ]

That sounds great Cameni. I'm looking forward to the improvements with the biomes!

Marko

I might see if there is some sort of global rock data. funny you should mention it but I was going to reduce the green in the rock.
I do see what you mean about the geass colour changing when you get farther from it.

EDIT: Ok, it's tricky to even find useful data that would represent the world of rocks.

Even knowing about the following rock types one would need to gather textures from across the globe (via the internet) to even get useful textures. However, it's knowing where each rock type is situated and then placing them using fractal procedure would be very challenging. Cameni, do you intend to access some sort of basic data for the rock types?

SEDIMENTARY ROCKS
METAMORPHIC ROCKS
IGNEOUS ROCKS

I've always been interested in being a texture artist but never really followed this as a career. I would be happy to do this sort of thing for the Outerra world as i'm sure you will need many textures.

[cameni]

There's a good source of prepared textures at cgtextures.com, we are taking most of them from there. Our source textures are usually seamlessly tiled 2048x2048 textures, currently downsampled to 512x512.

But for the rock coverage we would need a global map of rock type distribution, just like the biome maps that have 500m resolution. As with everything, it will be possible to modify the rock type locally via vector overlays, but it would be nice to have a global base to start with.

[KelvinNZ]

That sounds good and this site has a very large range of textures. It would be good to be able to work on some of these for Outerra once it allows for more textures. I'm quite the perfectionist.

I have actually removed the green from the rock image I reworked, I didn't realise how much green there was; probably staring at the screen for too long at once because when I came back to the texture I could definitely see the odd green you spoke of.


I have updated the texture file in the Version 2.0 zip file above to correct the green tint. I have also used another texture that i think looks quite pleasing to the eye.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/uuhtpen7mnuv84v/Custom_textures_v2.zip

[monks]

Glad to see that people are looking at this and it's beginning to come online! 

monks

[knorko]

I need to get a world "rock map" somewhere, to get a variation in rock types. Rock color usually isn't visible from above and the commonly available datasets do not contain it. There should be a geological map or something like that, but probably won't be available globally in a usable resolution.

not sure about this, but isn't this distributed by the blue marble data from nasa? i think that is what eric bruneton used for proland after all. but more probably i am shooting in the very wrong direction here...

[cameni]

I meant a map of rock types around the world, so that rocks can be textured properly for given location in the world.

[KelvinNZ]

I'm scouring the net for usable images to texture from. I am actually using a process called "doing it manually" and going through each continent and trying to get the main areas of rocky terrain to match with textures I have already. I am also looking at the main mineral rock types of the earth igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary and working down to find examples of each i.e basalt, bedrock, granite, etc... and then going to each region to determine the most common rock types. It is a hit and miss process but until something else comes up this is what i'm doing to match textures to rocks and where they belong.

I'm doing this same process with soils to match different Biomes which I have found to be a little more friendly.

Funny though, The one of the main sites I am using currently for rocks is a New Zealand University site:
http://flexiblelearning.auckland.ac.nz/rocks_minerals/rocks/diorite.html
then
http://geology.com/rocks/
then
http://www.sandatlas.org/rock-types/

Kelvin

[OttoPus]

I don't know what's the correct word to say "schistosity" in english; this is the definition:
"The schistosity is the property of some rocks to fall apart along parallel planes."

There are a lot of processes going on in rocks sedimentation of course, not only schistosity.
The zone where I live is plenty of layer of rocks exposed so you can actually see the stratification.

Like this:



I think that textures only cannot fully recreate these visuals... maybe it can be obtained in large scales with patterns and algorithms like grass and other items?

[cameni]

Right now the rocks appear as soon as the terrain slope rises over some predefined threshold, and the rock shape is determined by horizontal displacement that's driven by fractals, as can be seen in this (quite old) picture:



What I wanted to do was to incorporate also some real-world patterns of rock walls into it, so that different fault types could be simulated. It would work by performing a slightly randomized lookup into such a rock displacement map, and combining it with the existing fractal modulation.

I think there was a problem how to generate the horizontal lookup coordinate into the rock displacement map, that we haven't solved yet universally. It could work for rock walls created along the roads, but we need it also for canyons and cliffs etc.