Lowkee's Terrain Mod of Ridiculous Awesomeness
22. Lowkee's Terrain Mod of Ridiculous Awesomeness.
On February 4 Lowkee released his LK Appalacian Terrain Mod, and my mind was completely blown.
I've used Meadowshire for years. I love it. I love the gentle white powder of fresh snowfields, The soft grey of higher elevation rocky ground. Purple wildflowers incorporated into the mid elevation textures. The greenness that reminds me of Western Washington in May. That same brilliant green in the alpine reaches. In short, from sea level to the top of the mountains it fits the region I want to play on. It does such a good job that I've stuck with it even when the HD Pyrenees Terrain Mod was released by TSC.
Then Lowkee's Mod came along. I know he's been working on it meticulously for what seems like years, and the effort shows. So I downloaded it, made a fresh rendering Plugin folder and opened up my test region.
Here's Mt. Baker before with Meadowshire:
And the same Mountain with Lowkee:
Moving up to the Granddaddy of the region, Mt. Rainier, with Meadowshire:
And again with Lowkee:
Although the terrain texture is great the rocky area devoid of greenish textures between the yellow-tans and the snow was greater than I wanted for my region. So with some advice from Lowkee on how to not shoot myself in the foot I fired up Reader and pulled the snow textures down to cover most of what had been bare rock. But before we get to the results of that experiment let's get up close with the knitty gritty of the textures.
1. Mt. Rainier zoomed out. I like how the newer textures lend themselves well to glacial buildup on further out zoom levels. Of course meadowshire was nice in that the fresh white look was good for imitating a fresh snowfield. It's really too bad both can't coexist at once.
2. Closer zoom of the current summit crater of Mt. Rainier. That hard pack / ice look just gets better and better.
3. One of the Transitions on Mt. Rainier from snow to ground. On the default there would be a large zone of rocky scree slopes here. Those look very, very good too but I just tweaked it so it's more like what you find on Mt. Rainier, with the snow coming all the way down to the greenish areas.
4. An 'arm' of Mt. Baker. Here we see the greener textures nicely. Those little blips in the middle near the shore are flora from the next pic.
5. Just some random HD flora on an HD texture. Shiny
6. Black Butte on Mt. Baker, which is actually the core of a previous summit. The snow looks a little patchy here because I was playing with the cliff properties when I took this.
7. Same tile, rotated, with some wintery versions of HD flora.
8. Same area, zooming in a little.
9. Same, next to max zoom.
10. Another brown to snow transition in the High Cascades.
11. More barren upper elevation terrain with C.P.s doug firs to give an impression of scale.
12. Back in the Scott Bluff tile of Crater Lake.
13. It blends so good.
And finally, here's a shot of my region with Meadowshire, taken immediately before installing Lowkee's terrain.
And now with the entire region rerendered with Lowkee's. (You'll notice I also took the oportunity to do a little remodeling on the Bluewater River and the southern coastline to clean up some issues). Also, you can see the effects of pulling the snow textures down. The snow level is not a little lower than what it was before and shows up on some of the other ridges and mountains than just the volcanoes.
So there you have it; there's a new sheriff of Terrain mods. It is just the terrain textures that Lowkee has finished. The cliff texture he made is also excellent and blends perfectly with his terrain. The beach is still good but not really a super polished product (since many will undoubtably use Marsh's HD beach textures or rivit's). The water included is also excellent, however Shock Therapy over at simpeg just released his HD rework of the classic Brigantine and made a variety of coloration for it; I think it's a must have.
Lowkee's Terrain Mod can be found on the LEX (requires free registration) here: http://sc4devotion.c...php?lotGET=2753
Be warned; the HD texture pack that is a dependancy is something like 50 Megs, but it's well worth every byte. Also be sure to read the documentation if you have one of Lowkee's Flora Tuning Parameters installed.
I know this whole update is like a giant add but hey, I love this terrain mod. Over the next couple update's you'll see how it shines when we take the flora to it. (And holy cow does it shine). Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below; they're all appreciated. Don't be afraid to rate and +1 if you're so inclined. See you all next time.
Hmm.... I'm going to need to make new banners now. Anyways!:
@ ten trillion, Huston, emperordaniel, gugu3: Thanks guys very much for your comments; I'm glad you like it!
@ spursrule14; Thanks! Awards are always a good thing.
@dzekins: Sorry but I don't really. There are some ploppable people in the VIP packs or the RFR stuff I think, but they are doing specific scenes, like fishing.
@Adooxx: Thank you. There are many plopable water mods out there that you might want to take a look at. There's tahoe, edmonton, Dusktroopers, srotchin's, jeronij's, etc...
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