*Team Avalanche: WMRP(WorldMap Retexture Project)*

[secondadvent]

i hope you plan on releasing an installer before you go back over all of the already done textures  .

not that i have even been on the world map in a few years... i have been too busy playing around in the midgar areas 

[pyrozen]

apparently the snow covered mountains use the same random textue application technique as the beaches, so this is gonna ge a helluva job to do..... stupid squeenix and their overly complicated world generation tech

lee

[sl1982]

apparently the snow covered mountains use the same random textue application technique as the beaches, so this is gonna ge a helluva job to do..... stupid squeenix and their overly complicated world generation tech

lee

lol well im glad you decided to tackle it 

[sl1982]

Sorry to double post but i installed the stuff you have done so far and it looks promising. The only thing i would suggesst to improve is that the moving sand around the gold saucer is barely even noticeable. If i wasnt looking for it im sure i would not have noticed it was there. Great job so far though!

[Costa07]

Wow bro great job your snow looks amazing. Any clue on what your gonna do for the water that seems like its gonna be hard. keep up the good work.

[pyrozen]

i have no clue what i am going to do with the water ATM.  It all depends on how it tiles, if it's like the grass it will be easy, if it's like the beaches or mountains.... well... it'll be pretty tough.  I have toyed with idea that if i cannot get it to look good animated, i could change it to a nice static water texture but it would probably look very odd.  It's still all up in the air though, i haven't even attempted it yet and this snow is gonna take me awhile.

lee

[Costa07]

Hey take your time good work doesn't come easy. Your doing great

[sexymonkeys]

My current game shall be put on hold until this is complete. No matter how long it takes.

[pyrozen]

they look decent from a distance....


but a close look reveals the madness that hides within FF7 world map textures


it my first attempt, but it's going to be very difficult to get good results...

lee

[Costa07]

looking pretty goog for a starter

[sl1982]

I feel bad for you. That looks like a nightmare to teture

[sacrife]

Try to fill the edges with brown, so wherever the ends meet its brown on brown.

[gjoerulv]

Looks good. I haven't tested this, but are the textures seamless? You should at least try to make those snowy mountain textures seamless.

[Satoh]

the problem is the fading on the snowy bits... snow isn't transparent anyway, so give it hard edges and it'll immediately be easier to work with.

[pyrozen]

the problem is the fading on the snowy bits... snow isn't transparent anyway, so give it hard edges and it'll immediately be easier to work with.

I'll give it a go and see how it looks.  That's actually how the original texture is done anyway.

Looks good. I haven't tested this, but are the textures seamless? You should at least try to make those snowy mountain textures seamless.

the textures on the worldmap don't tile uniformly, so simply making them seamless doesn't do anything.  Most textures are divided into 4 sectors, and the game picks and flips the quadrants around.  Not sure why they did it that way, probably to cut down on visable tiling due to the superlow resolution on their stock textures.  It causes the opposite effect on hi-res textures though, so i guess they never planned on geeks revisiting their work 10 years later.

lee

[Timu Sumisu]

i know the tiling messes up traditional seamless textures, which is that the top flows into the bottom and left flows into the right and likewise. however, do the low rez act seamlessly in some way? do different edges match with other edges? would drawing the new textures high rez with the edges matching to the pixel like the originals did work? eg. the dark rocky part is dark to the perfect pixel, and white for the snoy area... would that work or am i wasting time theorizing this?

[pyrozen]

that's actually exactly how i create these new textures. 

I enlarge the original, pixel for pixel, to the size i want, and then turn the opacity down to 50% and work underneath it. I match all the dark/light areas as best as i can(wish i had a tablet). I'd say i get within a reasonable tolerance, maybe 2-9 pixels in or outside of the lines in some areas.  What's hard it that you can't tell which areas are supposed to match up, so if it looks bad or doiesn't line up correctly, your stuck recreating the entire layer mask again.

The blur is what causes the edges to misalign, but it usually looks alot better than the snow just cutting right off.  The low-res texture's actually don't blend together well at all, take a look at any mountains ingame, especially near corners.  The low-res, muddy nature of them makes it much less noticable than a hi-res texture.  The mountains near midgar are a perfect example of this.

lee


here's a nearly direct copy of the rock areas on the stock texture.  It all lines up fairly well, better than anything i've freehanded.  now i just ahve to find a way to make it look smoother.

*nope, any amount of smoothing causes the tiles to be very visable.  It's the blockiness of the stock textures that mask this effect... damn...

[Timu Sumisu]

make the blur the same on any edge? like, make a blur of the same amount of pixels around each edge of rock/snow. that should compensate

[pyrozen]

any sugestions on which one to use?  I tried using a gauissen at 10 pixels, but the was too much even though it was barely visable.  The tiling popped right out.

The way i made this texture was to lay down the mountain, then the snow on top of that.  I extracted the original rock formation from the stock texture using the magic pen, and pasted a black and white version onto a layer mask on the snow.  That's how i arrived at the current texture.  The alpha layer is easily modified, which lets me see any changes immediatly(after i load it up ingame) and blurring it has no effect on my base snow or mountain textures.

lee

[Timu Sumisu]

if i'm getting this right, your trying to create a blur/smooth transition betwen the snow n the rocks? take a linear white to transparent, however many pixels long you want the transition to be, and put it on the edge of every snow/rock transition that is against the edge of a texture. for the interior just make it looks okay with the rest of the work you did like i mentioned above.

EDIT:
let me reitterate, use the same linear gradient, paste the same one everywhere.

[pyrozen]

i tried yotu method timu, but still got the same results.  The rock areas don't line up at all, the blockiness is what makes them seem to blend together.


I tried to cheat and just use snow on the tops and bottom of the texture.  It looks passable, except for this one stupid spot.  Why on earth would they decide to flip the texture upside down right there, and nowhere else?

lee

[romeo14]

ya it doesnt look bad except for that one spot. its crazy that theres no ryme or reason for that one tile to be flipped. imagine how much of a nightmare it must have been for the game developers to make textures from scratch to fit the engine. Just keep thinking man, how awesome you will make the world map when your finished though...all that hard work will pay off dude

[secondadvent]

unless they made the background fit the textures they had, not the other way around. maybe they just figured that spot looked better with the texture flipped, and went with it (or someone just fudged up and put the texture the wrong way, but since there are many places where the textures are every which way, i am just assuming they fit the game to their textures).

[Costa07]

Dont look bad besides that spot the one pic before that ain't bad either way better than the original

[Hellbringer616]

to bad you couldn't just flip that texture.. anythin in the tex file or some other file that could flip it around maybe?