Voeille

Back to the past.

Your pictures actually made me try the ambient occlusion mod, and it improves the looks a lot. And doesn’t even lag much on my ageing laptop.

Here you go. Incidentally, it’s interesting how much is possible in this game, your shots from Waiheke are totally different to mine and it’s the same map!

Thank you! It took longer than I expected and I encountered some issues, but I finally finished my newest tree Workshop Page

OK I fixed it, it turns out that the colour mask needs to be reverted – white means that the area is left untouched, black means it should change colour. It’s counter-intuitive and I’m fairly sure I read somewhere it’s the opposite, but it works now! The performance question still persists.

I finished my new tree, but I have a problem with colour variations. I’ve noticed that vanilla trees and most workshop trees have varying brightness and I saw a setting for it in the asset editor, but it doesn’t work for me. I set minimum to 0.1 and left maximum at 1 to test it out (so it should go from basically black to the original colour), but it always shows the original brightness. It’s the same without changing any settings. I have a colour mask that contains only black and white (the leaf part is white and trunk is black as I don’t want it to change), however not having it doesn’t change anything. Every file is properly named. Is it possible that there’s a mod that breaks it? It doesn’t look bad now, but it’d be much better if the brightness were random. Size variation works fine. I’ve also noticed that it puts more strain on performance than other trees for no obvious reason. I have two versions, one with 2586 tris and the other with 1086, both with 1024x1024 textures, and while I can understand that the high poly one is heavy for my graphic card, I don’t really get that the lower poly one lags too. I have workshop trees that have the same texture size and much more than 1000 polys and they cause less lag. Did I do something wrong somehow?

I’m working on a new tree. I created the model using poorly made textures from random images as ‘preview textures’ to see if I got the model shape right (it’s much easier to work with a texture than just white square planes). After I finished the model I started making an original hand-painted texture, and so far I have a sketch with just vague shapes and colours, no shading and no detailing at all. I decided to use it and see in the game on the model, and it actually looks quite realistic, which I didn’t expect at all considering how little detailed the painting is at the moment. So the conclusion is that textures themselves don’t need to be photo-realistic to give a realistic effect in the game. I’m of course not going to leave it like that and I’ll finish the texture properly as I want it to look nice when zoomed in too, but it’s interesting to know. I think it’s a result of these factors: I filled the leaves with multiple colours instead of just one. The texture isn’t ‘dense’, i.e. there is lots of space between leaves instead of a lot of them on top of each other. I’m sure dynamic shadows in the game have something to say. I wish I’d discovered it before I made my other plants, they would surely look better. I’m posting it here as someone else might find it useful.

Changing lighting to classic and switching LUTs actually does quite a good job at making rainy weather appear less sunny. After the rain stops I switch back and the feel is completely different.

I’m slowly redecorating the awesome Waiheke map and I’m having fun with it!

Another plant by me, this time a hibiscus bush Workshop Page

Working on a hibiscus bush I think the main mesh and texture are finished, now I need to add flowers. This mesh is made from flat planes, which made it really low poly – only 136 tris now, so I have some leeway for flower and it’ll probably still stay in the low poly range.

I made a new plant Workshop Page

I’m working on a new plant, for the first time with hand-painted textures (I was looking at google pictures though, I’m not good enough at drawing to paint everything from imagination yet). I will have to make new leaves though, I reused some I drew some time ago, but hydrangea has a different leaf shape.