[SOLVED] Port Angeles Forest Shadow Question

[tmorris]

Looking at the Port Angeles demo one of the thing that really makes it look good from far away is the forest_shadow_decal. I was wondering how these were created?

 

Why this approach (.tga decal) rather then mapping a detail texture to the forest masks already used?

 

Thanks ahead of time!

 

-Terrence

[demostenes]

My guess: Because decal is faster than adding fully blended texture to terrain? Also detail texture probably wouldnt allow you such soft edges on forest borders, which are in this case achieved via alfa channel (alfa test+blend) of decal. And also you can easily achieve multicolor effect, you can notice, that it is not only adition of one color.

 

So I would ask why this approach instead of baking "shadow" into diffuse map or using darker set of textures for forests.

[silent]

These decals were added on the final stage (almost 1 day before the release).

 

We wanted to bake forest shadows into the terrain details texture at first, but turns out that for artists is more convinient to make a few decals (based on vegetation masks) and adjust them manually. I belive, Decal Grabber plugin was used (Plugins -> Manage -> Decal Grabber) to generate such decals.

 

Result will be the same if you bake shadows into the terrain details texture.

[tmorris]

Thank you, the Decal Grabber has been very helpful for this.