Rural Renewal Project

[Diggis]

That flora is amazing.  I love it 

[EDGE4194]

  can the flora get any better? Chris- all I can say is - 'wow'

[BigSlark]

Chris,

I am amazed. Congratulations on the best rural BAT project that I've seen in a long time.

Cheers,
Kevin

[figui]

nice things here
i'd reserved some areas for this stuff, whenever it is released

[Badsim]

The realism gained with these wildflowers and shrubs is once more breathtaking !   

A picture from Aubrac , one of the last true rural region of France ...





I don't know what are "Bluebonnets" , but heathers (just changing the color ) would be great too ...

[Chrisadams3997]

Thanks everybody, I promise I'm working on getting them up to snuff, but still things to do.

For Badsim and the others from other parts of the world who haven't had the pleasure of seeing bluebonnets before:


It's the state flower of Texas and often grows in with indian paintbrushes(the red flowers) down here in the spring.

I'll add the heather in too.  Like you noted, it's not very difficult for me at this point, takes longer to mod it in than render it.  I'll also have to scale the height down slightly, but that takes like 10 secs .

The biggest problem I have right now is coming from the way gmax renders the zoom 1's, as it tends to have single pixels that stand out on some of the .fsh's, so I'm working on good ways to edit the .fsh's from a more batched approach, so I don't have to go through them one by one(right now the only way I know to extract these types of fsh's is with datgen and fishman, which takes forever.)  Here's an example of the problem:



The bright white patches are coming from the areas of bluebonnets.  A similair situation, though not as bad occurs with the yellow flowers at zoom 4(which actually have a slightly different model that could account for it.)  An interesting note is that if I place them from zoom 5(or zoom 4 for the yellow ones), the bright spots don't show up.  Unfortunately placing them from that zoom is rather impractical.  Once I get that ironed out, I can get these wrapped up and move on to some of the other flora ideas I've got.

Chris

[Travis]

Looking good so far. 

I have a thought concerning that last problem. When you ran the props through the Plugin-Manager, did you set the "zooms appearance" property to "1,2,3,4,5" ? You could set their appearance to "2,3,4,5" and remove them from zoom 1 altogether, which isn't really a bad idea. You're not going to be able to see flowers from 5,000 feet up. 

Not sure if that will solve your issue, I'm not very well acquainted with mayor mode flora. 

[Chrisadams3997]

You don't even use the plugin manager for flora, it's always going to show at all zoom levels.  Though one could edit the .fsh alpha map at zoom 1 to be empty.  But I'd like something to show, just not big white or yellow, etc., spots .  plus that comes back around to having to edit the .fsh files.  But it's really the only solution.  What I'm going to try to do basically is render a version of the model with changed textures that will give the desired effect at the zooms in question, then copy and paste the appropriate .fsh's to the real model.

I've already tried it in one instance and it worked just fine, except that I still need to tweak the textures a bit, and I assume I can copy and paste between files as long as the lod is the same size.  Still needs more testing though.

Chris

[Andreas]

Ah yes, the joys of modding - tweaking and getting it right usually takes ten times longer than expected, and you have to start and exit the game countless times, which needs even more time. The basic modelling for a skyscraper is probably done in two hours (design one floor and then use the array tool), but it's the small things that need most of the attention after all.

[Travis]

If you don't use the Plugin Manager, how do you define it as a prop, i.e. how do you give it a description and custom icons if all you use is the model file? I must be missing something.  Like I said, I'm not well acquainted with mayor mode flora, even less so than I first thought. 

[Chrisadams3997]

Andreas:  10 times, don't you think that's a little conservative?  Let's say 15x just to be on the safe side .

Travis:  lol, you have to look at the plugin manager as a program with a bunch of templates for different types of exemplars in it, and it lets you fill in some of the variables.  You want to make a model act as a fire house? you tell it that, and it creates an exemplar with all the necessary properties to make it function as a fire house in game.  Alternatively I could pull up an exemplar for an already existing fire house and change the model res key to mine, then give it a new group and instance ID, tweak any properties I need to just like in the PM, save as, and viola, new fire house(note: this shouldn't be attempted unless you know what you're doing however, it's not quite as idiot proof .)  Anything you can do in PM, you can do in the reader(and a lot more besides.)

The reason I say all this is because Flora is an entirely different type of exemplar.  Just as you have building and prop exemplars(the two that PM will make), you also have flora exemplars.  Since the PM doesn't have a 'template' for that, you just have to hijack...er... make us of an existing flora exemplar as your template and change/add/delete the necessary properties.

Fun stuff, I promise......(see Andreas's post above )

Chris

[Ennedi]

Chris, your wildflowers not only look fantastic, in addition using them is very comfortable! 

It is possible to manipulate their density and simply paint by them! 

PS. I checked this in your signature  thank you!

[Travis]

Aha, I get it. 

I did know all about those templates and stuff (the well-known "drag 'n drop process in the PM), but didn't understand about that flora. I suspected
it was merely a matter of changing the instance ID and the occupant group of a prop exemplar. Well, you learn something new everyday. 

Fun stuff, I promise......

Indeed. I'm going to have to give it a try. 

Oh, looking forward to more progress on those fences too.

[bat56]

Only one word, brilliant.   
Which effort you makes for your work, I am fan!

[Ennedi]

Chris, I have an information for you 

You started this thread at 12th September. Today is 18th, and you have 94 answers and 970 views. After six days.
If it would be a MD, you would go to the "Bestsellers" section tomorrow! 

[SimNation]

Any chance you could make the fields have the sparkling stuff like whats on the Canals and other water lots? You so it looks like theres lighting bugs flying around.

[jacqulina]

awesome work you are doing here everything will make the rural areas look awesome,i love the flora its amazing

[Andreas]

Any chance you could make the fields have the sparkling stuff like whats on the Canals and other water lots? You so it looks like theres lighting bugs flying around.

I guess it would look very weird during daytime, but that's a nice idea. I haven't checked if the sparkling effect shows up in night mode, though - and it only works if the lot is powered.

[Chrisadams3997]

Well, not if you make a new effect out of it and remove the power requirement .  Of course the real reason I tried that was to see if I could get it to just show up at night.  The problem is it doesn't have a second 'state' like what you'd set up on a prop with a res key 4 property, so 'prop time of day' and such things have no effect.



It doesn't look like much here, but it's kind of interesting in game, particularly if you put a bunch next to each other.  The effect is far from perfect of course, but for something just 'adapted' to the purpose, eh.  Made for an interesting little side project at any rate(like, 30 minutes tops, lol)

Chris

[thundercrack83]

Well, this is very interesting! If I'm following correctly, you're trying to make something that simulates fireflies? Very creative idea, and you're off to a good start!