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Just wanted to do another work in progress thread. I was working on making hills outside of the level look more realistic and decided the landscape is good enough to release as a sort of a mix between a "test" and "full release" map. It's just gonna be mostly a walking around in the Forrest kind of level. I might add a few buildings, i.d.k. yet. I've got an idea for terrain textures I wanna try. Might look pretty neat when I'm done. Anyway, here's a screenshot.

It looks interesting. I like how you are working to make non-playable areas that you can still see look realistic and not use something like a billboard or something like that.

Reminds me a lot of IJ. Looks very natural this time around as well, I'm eager to see what you come up with!

Toying around with textures. I think there's a little too much dirt here. What do you think?

It looks nice! Maybe have more of the dirt and gravel parts around the steeper areas of the terrain, and leave the grass along the valley .

I like the overall colours. Whatever it is too much dirt or not will depend on what type of environment you are going for.

The main textures are 3x3 sections of 256x256 size textures. For the textures for the outside of the player space I took a bunch of the ground decos and rotated them at random angles and exported as a model and turned them into a single small 256x256 texture. Its scaled to the same size, just 1/3 the resolution.



Here you can see the resolution transition. I'm thinking about making a rather "large scaled" 3x3 section(tessellated) texture for the outside areas to reduce noticeable tiling, while being easy on the frame-rate. At least easy on the frame-rate in theory. I'm not really sure. I think it'll look good though.


I'm also gonna try using low res 2 sided sheet meshes for plants and trees outside the player space. So it looks densely populated. You shouldn't be able to tell too well at a distance.


Update: Here is the textures I did so far. And a screenshot showing the blend of the low and high res ones. High res up close, low res farther away. Don't worry, I'll work on hiding the blending before the map is finished. The masking still needs a lot of work, etc.

Ground texture, for use up close.


Hill texture, for use up close.


Ground texture for further away, out of player space.


And a screen showing the comparison of the 3 textures.


I'm using larger scale textures further away to reduce tiling. The textures are split up into 256x256 tiles before importing to TresEd.


Edit:
Testing a billboard tree. Low poly tree up on the hill. High poly in player space. It's a 8 polygon tree. I'll try to make the final map look a lot more dense and lit up better.


This map is turning out to be a fun technology test. Eventually If I get good enough I want to make a new campaign for the game... We'll see what happens, maybe next year. I would need help with the level ideas and story-line and such... Anyway, dreaming of future projects.
Would love to hear your opinion on the work so far.

Nice work there...

Some really nice work!

Tiling usually happens on low-quality terrains, so less quads and more flat = more blurry.
Using smaller TrnObj but with 256x256 textures should make them look much better than large-scaled ones.
TrnObj doesn't appear to effect the object limit in a level due to being applied to the terrain during level load, so it shouldn't effect FPS in any noticeable way. High detailed terrain will effect more.
The main limitation with TrnObj I would say is the palette colours.

Been mostly working on textures. I added some trees to get an idea of what the final product will look like. I'm just working on one small part of the map to get the graphics right. It still needs tree variety and vegetation. The whole terrain is already done but it needs optimized and tweaked for play-ability, but for now work is being done to get the look right. After that it'll be easy to make the whole map match. I wanna model a few buildings/structures to give the player something to do. Just gotta come up with ideas. Also gonna bake the lighting on the buildings. Should be a fun project.

I appreciate the environmental approach to new Tres content. I believe purely forest levels are fully worth while to make and release. This is essentially what "Mountain Forest" was that I released a bit ago.

Worked on a model, It's really low poly. 40 polygons by my math. I didn't see the sense of fully modeling something so far away. Every pillar would have had to be modeled and there would be like 1,200+ polys I bet.

Spoiler: show

Spoiler: show

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Not bad! I'm glad to see you creating more models. We can never have enough of them! Those terrain textures are looking beautiful.

Keep in mind that, while Trespasser's face limit is 2047 (3095 I believe with CE, but keep it as low as you can to be safe) per-model, this limit is for faces/triangles, not polygons specifically. I mention this because many times my polycount has been below the limit, but then when it came time for exporting and the mesh was converted to triangles in the TPM, it ended up being over the limit.

I may have to up the texture resolution. It gets way too pixelated not too far away. I'll try adding LOD mesh's first, see how it looks.

Edit: I made LOD copies of the model and it didn't help. Guess I'll be redoing the texture
I wouldn't mind using CE's custom texture resolution limits but I don't want the map to require any custom work to play. So I'll just split the model into more sections and apply more 256x256 textures.

Teromen wrote:I may have to up the texture resolution. It gets way too pixelated not too far away. I'll try adding LOD mesh's first, see how it looks.

Edit: I made LOD copies of the model and it didn't help. Guess I'll be redoing the texture
I wouldn't mind using CE's custom texture resolution limits but I don't want the map to require any custom work to play. So I'll just split the model into more sections and apply more 256x256 textures.

Have you tried increasing the CacheDist until the mesh doesn't become a 2D impostor until you're far away enough that it doesn't look bad?