[Bee]

If you are anything like me, you have probably had the feeling at some time or another that the forests in Il-2 are somewhat less than convincing. There are often conspicuous 'grids' to be seen in the tree canopies, and the forest floors often look like a pale scalp rather than a shadowed area.

When the extractor became available, I opened up some of these forest floor .tga's and was interested to see that they were remarkaby plain, with only a few token patches and trails to liven them up. Perhaps the makers thought they'd be barely seen, so why bother.
The exception though was the forest floor texture on Ian Boys excellent Burma map. This one had a darker, high contrast tone that gave a much greater sense of depth to to the wooded areas.

Using the the techniques developed by Fly_zo, lowfighter and such I was able to swap the old forest floor textures of many other maps for Ians Burma one. Much better! I also noticed that the forest tree layers on the Italy map were pretty much the only ones that didn't have a visible grid when looked at from altitude. When I combined the Burma floor with the Italy woods, I got this:

(The link is inoperative) grab0001-3.jpg

These are the pathways for the textures:

Wood0 = forest/summer/JungleKTABurma.tga (found at the bottom of the load.ini this makes the forest floor dark) Below are the Italian wood layers:

[WOOD]
Wood0 = Italy_DF/forest/summer/itawood0.tga
Wood1 = Italy_DF/forest/summer/itawood1.tga
Wood2 = Italy_DF/forest/summer/itawood2.tga
Wood3 = Italy_DF/forest/summer/itawood3.tga
Wood4 = Italy_DF/forest/summer/itawood4.tga
WoodMask2 = forest/summer/ForestMask.tga
WoodMask3 = forest/summer/ForestMask2.tga
WoodMiniMasks = forest/summer/MiniMask.tga
SideWood = forest/summer/ForestSide.tga


Now, here's the thing....
The Burma floor texture is pretty good for most needs. The bright green is perhaps a little garish, but it gets the job done. When it comes to real jungle though, such as might be seen on the New Guinea or Guadalcanal map, it doesn't quite convey the illusion of depth. The jungles don't look particularly wild or sinister. I did find another Burma texture though. A real darkie too

This one is forest/summer/JungleKT.tga



Notice how it makes the trees suddenly appear much more irregular in height and the jungle suddenly has a greater illusion of depth? Pretty cool huh?
Only trouble is, it needs to be set at a very low resolution (-2) to get that mottled patchy look. Which makes the edges of the forest look like CFS3 on a bad day

What I'm wondering is, can any of our resident geniuses create more detailed textures that have a similar feel to the JungleKT seen above so as to lend more realism to our jungle maps? Something that can do the job but still look good at the edges would be ideal. :wink:

[Bee]

Oh, and I forgot to mention why I haven't done it myself - I'm red/green colour blind. Not good for skinning or texture making, and occasionally near fatal:

Me: Of course I remember our first date honey. You wore the red dress.

Her: Bastard! It was green!!!

[spud]

I'd like to see a forest (WOOD) set of layers that doesn't make a pattern, but also doesn't look like pine trees, too.

[Bee]

I think the cause of the grid effect on the tree canopy is that the texture artist have attempted to vary the colour of the trees to some extent. The high visible distance of these textures seem to make any variation in colour appear repetetive. The only ones that don't do this are the Italy and Slovakia ones. Both are very uniform in colour. Perhaps new jungle wood textures can be made that can solve this.