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[genXgamer]

G'day Everyone

I have made up a palm plantation backdrop for my Green Hell 43 map and thought I would share it.
It continues the work of Greif11 and the majority of credit should go to him.

Download: https://www.mediafire.com/file/tgaayl40odfdbyf/Side_Palm_Plantations.7z/file

Suggested reading WxTech's reply #64
https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,56696.60.html



This work is free from any restrictions, in other words do whatever you want with it.

[Vampire_pilot]

looks nice!
moved.

[Alfie Noakes]

+1

Impressive vegetation 

Cheers

Alfie

[WxTech]

I've done some tweaking.

- Made the texture color and tone more closely match that of my Pacific bushy palm mod textures.

- Altered the lighting parameters in the .mat files so that the behavior more closely matches that of the palm trees (at least for my bushy palm mod.) Further to this end, I also altered the surface normals, orienting not perpendicular the the face, but instead angling them upward. (I'll explain the reasoning when I make up the readme file.)

- Added some transparency cut-outs between tree trunks. This adds to a 3-D effect because of other more distant elements seen through them. (This would be particularly effective for the proposed object described below.)

- Combined the two objects into one. That is, what was formerly two single-faced objects is now a single object textured on both sides.

- Added two additional LODs, with partial transparency, for a better transition in appearance/disappearance.

- Increased the size to better match the existing palms, as well as further widening so that the texture not look quite so 'squished'. The new size is 16m tall and 40m wide.


What I might do:

Make a palm plantation block of 40m x 40m, so as to properly cover the terrain. My current plan is a 6 x 6 grid of these objects, with a 'roof' canopy texture placed at about the height of the trunk tops. This 'roof' would have transparency gaps, and the lowered height would permit the irregular profile of the grid parts to still contribute to the appearance of varying tree tops. If necessary, in order to provide a shadowed ground interior, a 'floor' texture might be added. This would likely be a partially transparent, dark texture, so that the underlying terrain texture would still show through.

[genXgamer]

G'day WxTech

Glad you got on board and fixing a number of things I was concerned about.
Originally I had both images on a single .tga but just couldn't remove the black line at the top of the top image in game, which also appears on greif11's work.

Look forward to seeing the final results!

[WxTech]

genX,
When you're using the full area of a texture, and your material mapping goes all the way to the edge, this effectively wraps around to the opposite edge. And this can result in including that very edge.

This is the basis of getting repeating textures for a very long aspect ratio part, such as a canopy frame bar. Let's say said bar is 10 times longer than it's wide, and the surface to be mapped is constructed with 4 corner vertices. But you're applying a SQUARE texture that must not be stretched and hence distorted. You might map it such that the Y coordinates are, say, 0 and 10. The texture would then repeat itself 10 times, without distortion, along the full length of the bar. Or these cords could be -10 and 0. Or 0.5 and 10.5.

In your case, you had mapped the Y coordinates to 0.0 (the top edge) and 1.0 (the bottom edge. This just edges into wrapping around. You need a gap. So instead you need to stop just a bit short, by 1 pixel or more. Make the Y value that was formerly 0.0 now equal 0.001. For a 1024 pixel texture, this maps to pixel position 1024 * 0.001 = 1.024. For a 512 pixel texture, make the Y coordinate 0.002. For 256 pixels, 0.004. And so on.

Keep this in mind, and you'll avoid those strange lines floating about!

And always check that the alpha layer of a texture is indeed properly black along the edges where it's supposed to be fully transparent. I've seen many textures that must have had some smoothing/blurring applied, and which resulted in a grey edge. When that happens, the same kind of line artifact can happen.

[stanislao]

    Great job WxT   !    I love your perfectionism  ! ! !     

[WxTech]

I've got the 40m x 40m palm plantation block essentially finished. The total polygon count is 52. The number of trees effectively represented is at least 36, for a poly per tree ratio of roughly 1.5.

Three LODs, two of which have partial transparency, give a better transition in appearance/disappearance.

Remaining to do is the collision box. This'll be my first time making up a collision box. I plan to make the top a bit shorter in height than the tops of the vegetation. This will allow to plunge down a bit 'into the weeds' without blowing up. As in real life, swishing through the upper fronds shouldn't be instantly fatal. 

As a test I plunked down a few dozen of these blocks so as to make up a large-ish plantation beside a runway. The frame rate hit is sure a whole lot less than would result if an appropriate number of the existing palm trees were laid down even remotely densely enough.

[lowfighter]

This is a nice add, genX!
Very interested to see the 40m x 40m block in action!
 

[WxTech]

40m square palm plantation object available in this thread:

https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,65379.0.html