New Steel: OpenGFX Inspired Stations in 32bpp

[supermop]

Unfortunately, After making up a quick basalt material and applying the bump map, as well as a brick procedure, it is not nearly bumpy enough! Compared to the modeled stone you can barely see the bossing. Part of the problem is that I added extra procedural roughness to the material, which may be drowning out the relief. Also there is still not enough contrast between the flat and bumpy areas....

bossage wip5.PNG (315.8 KiB) Viewed 4397 times

Next step will be to go back and add some sharper transitions into the greyscale, lighten up the bumpy areas, and perhaps overlay a gradient to make the center appear to have more of a protruding ridge. I could also just try to map this material onto a surface that has some simple repeating embossed areas modeled, but that defeats much of the purpose of making a texture and bumpmap in the first place.

As it stands the texture is likely fine for most areas, but more prominent details, like corner quoins on station head houses, etc, may need to augmented with actual modeled stone blocks:

bossage wip6.PNG (321.43 KiB) Viewed 4397 times

[V453000 :)]

1. you could save yourself a lot of time and do it by texture
2. having each brick with slightly different colour makes it look more natural, and immediately creates a difference between bricks
3. is it visible in sprites?

[supermop]

Off topic, while digging around in old work, I found these unfinished 8bpp rail sprites.

The idea was to have a full tile of gravel around the track to let yards and stations look less awkward. Looking at these i recall why I decided never to do pixel art again, and ceased drawing sprites for about 4 years...

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TestRail4x.png

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[supermop]

Also found this old thing:

monoRail1x8.png (10.74 KiB) Viewed 4238 times

It should be fairly straightforward to make a rendered version of these, but I am not sure what the purpose would be. There are plenty of railtypes out there already, and it seems the wrong way around to be making track sets just to match with a particular station set.

[Quast65]

It is still possible to have graphics in the station tiles that "overlap" the graphics of a "clean" railtype a bit and thus adding a grittier/dirtier overlay.
I have thought about that with my work on the Dutch Station Set. Problem I had with that is how you would implement the start and end of those overlays....
It would look a bit strange if you have a "clean" railtype suddenly going over into dirty/gritty stationtile. You need a transition for that.

I chose not to impliment that feature and for my personal games I edited my favorite railtype so it was dirtier/grittier everywhere.
To be honest, I dont understand why railtype developers dont use an entire tile for their graphics... There is so much extra space they can use....

So..., I would say, yes!, make a full tile railtype that has a nice transition from dirty to clean towards its outer ends. It looks so much better!!
With that I mean the transition from the standard "gravel" under the rails to the outer edge of the tile.

All the railtypes I know of just only have the gravel under the rails, adding some subtle dirt next to that towards the clean grass blends it in so much better with the environment (and especially stations).

Try it out!!

[supermop]

Thanks for the input!

I guess the issues of track 'dirtiness' and full tile ballast are two different things. I don't mind rails being the same amount of dirty everywhere - in real life of course one may find more trash and litter on the rails in a station, as well as more oil stains under areas that trains are stopped, but it doesn't look bad in my option to have the track inside the station look the same as elsewhere.

I think the real value for full tile gravel or pavement is for making the approaches to stations, as well as empty space between two platforms look less strange - without so much green grass - as well as allowing one to create yards with points and signals. The problem does remain, as you mention, as how to handle the sharp transition to grass at the edge of the tile. I think any such railtype could have some edges of grass as part of or instead of a fence sprite. That way you get a transition to grass at the edge of the track/grass border, but no grass between to track tiles.

I think for these stations I will continue to model and render concrete or gravel based tracks as before, but these old 8bpp sprites could be used to create a simple 'yard' railtype grf if someone is interested - and I can then provide 32bpp tracks from these stations when they are ready.

Best,