Hi I noticed that some of you like my grass textures at Croft. To be honest I'm suprised a little bit, I'm not an expert in this area and my results are effect of many experiments, but I thought that if it could help some one I will share my grass texturing technique. It's simple, nothing special. I use blended grass infield shader. The most important is main texture. It's my photo reworked in photoshop. First you need to do a photo at an angle and at proper hight. Angle and hight should be similar as in your car cockpit view. Thanks to this you can see more details on grass from cockpit during driving in sim. http://feels3.strefa.pl/sim/grass1.jpg Second step - you need to reduce lighting and visible tiling from original photo. You can use clone tool to do that. You need to be patient at this step, nothing more. http://feels3.strefa.pl/sim/grass2.jpg http://feels3.strefa.pl/sim/grass3.jpg Next step is mapping. I use spline mapping for edges and terrain which is close to road and planar mapping for other terrain. Remember to keep the right direction for textures in spline mapping. You should see your textures while driving from the same view as you did your photo. http://feels3.strefa.pl/sim/grass4.jpg For whole terrain I use one or few big textures which are placed in other mapping channel. This texture covers main tiled textures. http://feels3.strefa.pl/sim/grass5.jpg Last step is for final touches. I usually add some colours (mainly dark grays) to the single vertexes. You can add some darker areas in places where you want. Remember to change channel to vertex colour in object properties before you will start changing vertex colours. http://feels3.strefa.pl/sim/grass6.jpg This technique is vere easy and is similar to this one: http://feels3.strefa.pl/sim/grass7.jpg Main difference is that my skills are not that good to create such a high quality results, but I'm trying to improve. If some of you have some interesting ideas, please share your knowledge here
Thanks for sharing Feels, it will help greatly and any ideas are better than none from another beginners point of view...
This is very interesting,thank you very much. I have create a texture to remap and this is a very good point of view to start. Thanks.
This kind of initiative is simply glorious. Well done feels3! That's how we build a high-quality community work!
I had a thought a while ago to try something somewhat similar to this technique. The difference being: changing the photographic angle depending on the mip-map. So, for instance, in the highest mip, the grass would be photographed as top-down as possible, then the next mip would be at more of an angle, and so on. The idea being that what you're seeing changes depending on viewing angle. At top down, you see much less of the grass, and more soil (depending on how thick the grass is, and how flattened it is, of course), but when you're looking out over the distance, you're seeing almost entirely grass. If I had to guess, the grass at many tracks is not of 'lawn quality', and probably not trimmed to such a short length, either--but this will vary greatly from track to track. Granted, my idea it only works if you have texture quality set to full (if it works at all). Plus, it is a TON of work, since you have to create multiple tileable textures. But once you have it, you can probably get a lot of use out of it.
Mipmap level selection depends on many factors: - distance - screen resolution - viewing angle - texture quality setting - anisotropic filtering setting - shader (in some cases) - graphics driver settings Some of these are up to modder, but not all. So I wouldn't base any rendering trick on it - results would be unstable. Having grass composed of multiple shots would rather require dedicated shader, but while shader itself would be pretty easy to implement, preparing textures would be extremely difficult. In the end you may end up with results that are not up to your expectations.
