Daggerfall Workshop Forums

These textures look awesome!

TheLacus wrote: ↑Tue Jul 14, 2020 9:25 pm I'm not really happy with water. It looks great up-close, but i can't fully avoid the "floating" look from a distance...

A quick fix for this issue to my mind is wider water texture blending, less saturation, more value. I see that the water texture looks very close to vanilla. But you use realistic textures and compared to them water looks more cartoonish. You will never see a dark blue water like this IRL.

A long way is to write a custom water shader (or make it in any shader editor for Unity). Separate a plane in two. First for the ground. Tessellation + displacement from height map. Second for the water. Animated normal map (two procedural cloud textures of different scale moving in different directions), fresnel, transparency, refraction. Reflection would be great, but I don't know how to make it in Unity as the engine uses reflection probe system. Perhaps it can be done via Shader Graph also, but it is a real pain for gpu.
NB: Shader Graph is free but it doesn't offer tessellation node. Amplify Shader does have tessellation but this editor is pricey for just an experiment. But there is a Unity documentation for writing shaders including tessellation and displacement and it's free.

Half of what I wrote I know only in theory. And I may be completely wrong with all these thoughts. Just trying to help.

Great!

TheLacus wrote: ↑Tue Jul 14, 2020 9:25 pm

pango wrote: ↑Sun Jul 12, 2020 1:30 pm This looks really good!
Could it be possible to add some noise in the alpha maps? I imagine that at the border of, say, grass and road, you'd find patches of grass/road that deviate from the theoretical straight frontier.
I assume the difficulty would be to make that noise also tile seamlessly...

I changed idea on height blending and decided is worth to work on it before doing further improvements to alpha maps.
I edited the standard terrain shader to read height information from the alpha channel (created as greyscale of main textures) and use it for blending. I think the result it promising, at least for solid materials:


Screenshot_hb_2.jpeg

Screenshot_hb_0.jpeg

I'm not really happy with water. It looks great up-close, but i can't fully avoid the "floating" look from a distance...


Screenshot_hb_3.jpeg

This post gives me life. I love the swamp regions of Iliac Bay and this looks awesome!

Mountain sample works well for me. Temperate sample is freaking awesome to my eyes -- love the way the sand blends onto the road with heightmaps. Swamp looks good but maybe a little blurry -- seems like the paving stones fade out into transition instead of getting flooded over with heightmaps. Dunno if a wider transition would help, or stronger heightmaps.

As commented above, yeah, just knocking down the saturation on the water textures might help a lot. I live by a pond, and it's almost never blue (unless everything is JUST right for it to reflect a bright sky). But I don't trust my visual memory very much, so:

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch& ... CAY&uact=5

Which points out that the two major first step approximations would be either a distorted mirror, or a distorted window pane to whatever is under that water... Of course, blending both based on eye angle is appropriate, but requires a pixel shader... I'd be tempted to try the "distorted mirror over muddy rocks" just to see if it passes well enough.

I decided to start releasing what i have now as a beta. Please note that it's not ready to be used for actual gameplay, especially because Desert and Winter textures are not included.

• Requires Daggerfall Unity 0.10.25.
• Only Mountain, Swamp and Temperate climates (doesn't include Desert and Winter variations).
• Only Water, Dirt, Grass and Road textures (doesn't include Stones and Farm Ground).

Download

Finished all climates. There is still work to do to improve alpha maps and consistency between materials, but the core mod is done. I'm quite happy about the winter season. I used height blending over the entire road surface, so only top parts of the stones emerges from the snow and i think it makes for an interesting effect:

EDIT removed old downloads

Its nice to see this progressing well, great job really!

Only note I have is towards preserving the original brightness of materials. Here for example the new snow is too bright compared to original.
I downloaded the screenshot and tryed to adjust it so its more fitting and it required -45 on the contrast, which is quite a lot.

If you want, I can try to remaster the colors so they resemble the darker original better, just for a test. I will not release it as my work or anything like that, I will ping the remastered textures back to you. I just want to use this mod and see this issue there. Would that be possible at some point?

Cool stuff, thanks!

great

King of Worms wrote: ↑Sun Aug 02, 2020 2:08 pm If you want, I can try to remaster the colors so they resemble the darker original better, just for a test.

Sure, i'll send them to you later today