I hope this is a good place to reach Kunos, cause well first I have to say that stuff they showed us so far is just amazing! All kudos to Kunos =) Except well, with all the high quality gorgeous models and textures, one thing really pierces my eyes is how the 3d grass looks. Not much to the grass texture itself, but the lack of variety in shading..
Even if you CAN see the difference in color on the screenshots like those yellowish/brownish spots.. The problem is that they are too uniform.
In reality, no grass blade has the same "brightness" or "hue" cause it all depends on different factors such as: time in shadow, soil nutrition and water, air humidity, pressure (if it's being walked or driven over), and few more.. What it looks on the screenshots you showed us is that all blades are the same, and it looks very repeatable, bland, unrealistic and artificial, you name it..
And brightness changes also come in "clumps" so to say, not uniform random "dots", but in a more (lets use the stupid word, but you know what I mean) "organic" way.
In some my tracks I tried to pay attention to this and make same texture with different brightness and WOW.. It just sets realism to a higher league!
I don't use grass everywhere like you, but just just on some pieces where it's thicker, but since you are using it everywhere this would help greatly! And of course, I had to hand plant the objects to create realistic/logical visible clumps, not just scatter uniformly. But I guess if I had better programming skills it could've been done through scripts too.
In this one I actually made the same grass texture but repeated it on a bigger texture with I think 10 versions of variety in brightness and color,(not very good performance wise), but generally it could be done (much easier) with other methods such as vertex painting or add/multi layers on top
I hope you'll see this and well this could serve as a tutorial for others too =)
PS. Kunos: what happened to that teamspeak you promised? Am I missing it somewhere or is it not there yet?
Even if you CAN see the difference in color on the screenshots like those yellowish/brownish spots.. The problem is that they are too uniform.
In reality, no grass blade has the same "brightness" or "hue" cause it all depends on different factors such as: time in shadow, soil nutrition and water, air humidity, pressure (if it's being walked or driven over), and few more.. What it looks on the screenshots you showed us is that all blades are the same, and it looks very repeatable, bland, unrealistic and artificial, you name it..
And brightness changes also come in "clumps" so to say, not uniform random "dots", but in a more (lets use the stupid word, but you know what I mean) "organic" way.
In some my tracks I tried to pay attention to this and make same texture with different brightness and WOW.. It just sets realism to a higher league!
I don't use grass everywhere like you, but just just on some pieces where it's thicker, but since you are using it everywhere this would help greatly! And of course, I had to hand plant the objects to create realistic/logical visible clumps, not just scatter uniformly. But I guess if I had better programming skills it could've been done through scripts too.
In this one I actually made the same grass texture but repeated it on a bigger texture with I think 10 versions of variety in brightness and color,(not very good performance wise), but generally it could be done (much easier) with other methods such as vertex painting or add/multi layers on top
I hope you'll see this and well this could serve as a tutorial for others too =)
PS. Kunos: what happened to that teamspeak you promised? Am I missing it somewhere or is it not there yet?
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