Do you think there's any way you could make the transition from grass to rock/sand more fluent... maybe use a thin transparent brush over the base of the hill, with the grass texture fading out irregularly... kinda hard to explain but maybe you'll get the point
Well, it depends on how old "Bloddy Ridge" is. If it is a recent lava flow (a couple of years old), it should be darker texture and have a rounded edge where it touches the grass. There should also be debris, like burned trees. If it is a very old flow, it should have grass and only a few stunted bushes. I'm not sure if you are going for a "porkchop hill" look, but if the ridge vegitation was removed by war, there should be evidence of battle and maybe mud flows.
Anyway, I agree with jv_map--the ridge needs a better texture to match that great jungle. Or, the grass needs a different texture to match the ridge.
Before the Battle of Bloody Ridge, there was just some scrub brush and grass clumps on the ridge. The dirt color is pretty accurate, but blending the edges would be good. I'll try and do that and add more detail plants on the ridge, but I am running out of fps to work with.
Transition textures would be nice indeed, but I also found another way to simply mask some of those edges. The grass line/straw texture you used in that last screenshot could be great for some of the borders;
Last edited by panTera on Sun May 09, 2004 12:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Don't let the framerates fool you. This was taken on my other PC. It's an Athlon 64 3400+/GFX 5900XT. I don't usually use it for mapping or testing, because it's to fast to get an accurate idea of what realistic performance to expect. But, I wanted to compile quick to see how this idea worked. It does bsp, full vis and lighting in 2 minutes.
I'm glad you got the transition grass in there. I didn't want to comment on it but it looked like a big brown turd fell from the sky onto the island. (That's not a comment on your mapping quality, that's just the image I got in my mind when I saw that big brown shape in the middle of all that green)
Speaking of green, the map looks really good. And I know you are busting your butt on this. But with the tree leaves and the ground matching so closely in color, it can visually flatten the image out.
What about shifting the color of the ground texture a little more brown, or a darker shade of green? or a mixture of both? You could also make a custom texture that has spots of the dirt mixed into the green to show areas of thinner vegetation. Maybe even add some more small solid dirt patches with that nice transition texture around the edges. That might work nicely in places where you have signs of habitation like the huts. And it would be mostly reusing the textures you already have to avoid a framerate hit.
