Beach Resort WiP

[Refar]

Here is the new beach resort building as requested by the Realism Invictus mod.

I call it done for now, but will postpone officially releasing it to the database a bit, to see if some issues come up. For now the file is attached a few posts below.



It is made to work on harbor LSysem and scale.
<LSystem>LSYSTEM_HARBOR</LSystem>
<bAnimated>0</bAnimated>
<fScale>1.0</fScale>
<fInterfaceScale>1.5</fInterfaceScale>

Original WiP message:

Spoiler :

This is a work in progress for now, going to be kind of a beach holiday resort building, when it is done.

The attached zip is a WiP so people concerned can take a look and possible offer some ideas. But keep in mind, that this is not done yet - some plants and beach umbrellas are going to be added, once the shoreline problem is solved. The texture is unfinished also.

The problem is how the sandbank blends into water - i wasn't aware before, but the water does not have any transparency layers, so we have that sharply cut off edge (the model does in fact go below water).
Any ides on how to soften that up?

 

[hrochland]

Pretty. Book me there, please , one room for a week. (In summer )

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Yes, I see the problem here. Actually, this could probably be solved by making the blend in the texture itself. If you look at how some features with underwater parts are handled (ice, for example), the below-water parts actually have alpha to gradually fade from view.

This approach won't work here, since it isn't drawn below water, but you could probably made the borderline less stark if the part of the texture that is supposed to be below water is actually colored like water, and along the border it blends into sand. Also, I suggest you take the sand texture from actual coast textures - then it will blend into landscape better.

Actually, what should probably be possible is moving the model enough back inside the nif file that the beach could blend not into water, but onto the shore itself...

 

[Refar]

Making a blend using the coastal textures could work, good idea, i will try around a bit.

 

[Ekmek]

Civ5 does has transparency for the sea. I'll try to convert this when you are done and see what happens

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Civ5 does has transparency for the sea. I'll try to convert this when you are done and see what happens

Civ 4 is quite funny in this aspect: it has transparency, but it is very arbitrary in what it applies to. For instance, it applies to some features (for some reason it is defined by how the tiling is set for the feature), and some units - this seems to be the funniest part for me, since it applies to players' ships, but not to barbarian ships. I can't see how this could be a deliberate design decision, so I guess it's just a graphical engine bug.

 

[Refar]

Here is an update. Using actual coast textures for the beach was a good idea. The transition is still a bit sharper, than the normal map coast (could maybe be improved with a better paint job). Overall - the textures could use some more work - especially the grass\flowers plane (yea, those red stains are supposed to be flower-beds ); But at the moment i seem unable to produce something better (the 512 version of the texture is attached, if someone else want to try and paint something better).

Aside from the textures i think i am rather content with the results. There might be a few more palm-trees/umbrellas. However while they are only a bit over a dozen triangles each, adding many of them still will cause the polycount to go up (they already responsible for about 30% of it). Right now we are at about ~450 triangles, which is a bit more than the average stock building.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Yes, I like this version a lot. I will try to improve it myself a bit when I get home today.

 

[The_J]

Like it too, it's a nice work .

 

[Refar]

Walter, hold off editing the texture please, if you didn't already. I have the idea for a minor change to the model (making that foundation smaller to reduce the empty space covered with that ugly grass texture of my).
I do not plan to change the texture layout, but still...

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

OK, I wait.

 

[Refar]

Ok, sorry about that delay. Here is what i will call the final version, unless some unexpected problem or bug turns up. As said, i made the foundation slightly smaller, and added a few more palms after all, so it does not look as empty. With some other geometry slightly simplified , we are still at 460 triangles, so i think it's ok.

For me LSystem Harbor does not seem to display shadows on the map, and i had some weird alignment issues in the pedia (they seem to be using different rendering settings there...), so i removed the background shadow plane (original harbors have none either). The palms and umbrellas have shadows as part of the building model itself.



@Ekmek: if you want to take it for Civ5, to work with real water transparency, you will have to slightly reshape the beach, bending down its outer edges, so it does reach below water again.

 

[Ekmek]

@Ekmek: if you want to take it for Civ5, to work with real water transparency, you will have to slightly reshape the beach, bending down its outer edges, so it does reach below water again.

Cool. I'll have a look. It may be a week or two before I get to it but I'll post a picture when I do.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Great! I like how it turned out. I will still tweak the texture a bit, if only to create a version for RI terrain textures. But I suggest you post this version as the finished one.

 

[Refar]

I used the upper-right corner of the vanilla coastblend.dds for the beach - if the RI terrain is just a recolor leaving the rough shape of the coast unchanged, you can probably just c&p the same part of the texture over it.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Yes, I noticed that. I worked with textures long enough I recognize stuff like that instantly.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

OK, here's my tweaked version. It mostly concerns three things - I switched to RI coast texture (as I mentioned earlier), remade the umbrellas (though multicolored ones now look kinda weird) and made the way down to the beach a stone ladder instead of a sand path (a matter of personal preference). Generally, mine should just be considered an RI-specific variant. Added it to RI, and it works great! Thanks again!

 

[Refar]

The stripped umbrellas are a good idea. That slight bend you added to the lines is making it look more natural. And i also like the noise/speckles you added to the grassplane.
My PC just died on me, and i´m in the process of setting up a new one. Should be good to go again by the weekend, in case you/RI need something else.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Thanks! And RI always needs something else.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

How's your PC doing?

I was thinking for a similar concept, but with units. Rise of Nations has some quite interesting units that, unfortunately, also can't be directly ripped from there. In particular, some ships (when it comes to ships, especially non-European, CFC database is surprisingly poor):

http://ron.heavengames.com/gameinfo/units/pix/RoN/Default/Age1/bark.jpg
http://ron.heavengames.com/gameinfo/units/pix/RoN/Default/Age2/dromon.jpg
http://ron.heavengames.com/gameinfo/units/pix/RoN/Default/Age1/fishermen.jpg

While a direct recreation of those units would also be quite useful, I think in process you could restyle them a bit so they become even more fitting for Southeast Asia, a region currently undeservedly lacking flavor ships. Some concepts:

http://southpacifichotels.travel/wi...,_a_prototype_of_ancient_Polynesian_boats.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/triqstudio/7374378346/
http://www.coroflot.com/thismywork/3d-game-reels-and-demo
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_QmG54mDr1Mg/SXqaMtD7U6I/AAAAAAAAABo/ihPEy9rAFHk/s320/sriwijaya.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_OBE3U_cap2Y/R6a_T7Zy9FI/AAAAAAAAAGY/n2R3L4VZMaA/s320/padewakang+cut.jpg

I'm attaching textures from the three units above. They are a bit low-res, but still I think they could work. The second to last one could probably make a good use of textures from Dragon ships: http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=10087