[redko]

I've always been impressed by the nice lines you have in the relief of some of the mountain textures.

Now that I'm starting to learn about some of this, I thought of a question I hope sounds intelligible :lol:

Those nice contrasting areas that so effectively illustrate crevices and geological features: is that part of the bump map or simply a texture that is integrated so well we won't see the repetition?

Thanks for your great looking work

Cheers

Triad

humm... no it's a VERY good question! And I would like to see more map makers taking part to this reflection (thanks for that VonBarb and Agracier). Thanks for asking it.

It's just texture, no relief, only illusion...but it helps to give impression of lot of 3d modeling. If you look close there is a little bit repetition, it's impossible to avoid that if we consider how il2 deals with texturing. All the trick, as i already said it before in many topics, consist in manual painting. Agracier asked by which system I asign textures in page 2 or 3 of this topic.

All i do with my "all by the hands" method is to break the lines, all the lines created by repetition. I could release this map tonigh if i want but i know there is still things to do with this map to get it better and all details are importants to give a real feeling of flight. There is still parts on this map which need to be manually painted.

Ok. Take a look again to pic 10 for exemple :

10.


It's not easy to see this but there is 5 different textures here, which are, starting from left to right:

texture a


texture b


texture c


texture d


and again texture a


Now....look with attention the left part of the pic 10. Now you can distinguish texture a,b and c MELTED ! No repetition. Texture d for mountains is in contact with melted textures a,b,c in an non linear way so i avoided to have a rectilinear frontier between this to parts.

In general for a texture A for exemple i create a transition texture B which allows me to have a nice transition for a texture...C. As Agracier guessed well sometimes to improve transition between textures I paint texture A with parts of texture B, and B with A.... This was my first method. Now that i have more experience i can complicate this method.

And this is what you can see here in pic 10. Instead of havind a single B transtition texture between texture A and C...i have instead in the left side a group of melted textures in contact with the next texture in the right where we find mountain texture.

For the more specific problem of crevices and geological features as you asked i use one single texture ! So what helps me to avoid repetition you can ask ? just 2 things : the relief and wood.

Relief first because it breaks all kind of repetition lines as with a relief there is no linear perspective. Linear perspective is reponsable of repetition.

Second the wood texture in which I also use in background the mountain texture, help me to break repetitions when I see there is to much:



As you can see in this black and white picture my wood texture is used in a kind of random way in order to prevent any repetition in the mountains textures.


Hope this can help. As many people is asking me about texturing if god gives me time I will do a tutorial....not that I consider myself as a teacher but if can help the community why not. And the questions are most of time the same so a tutorial could help everybody to save time.