New Graphics - Blender ".blend" thread (Works In Progress)

[athanasios]

Thanks for your post.
1. I agree they are blurry.
2. Big contrast between East and West. It is something that looked odd in Simutrans too.

Blender settings don't give the desired effect. As I said before: 'happy' Photoshop or Gimp days ahead!

[Ben_Robbins_]

GeekToo: Nice work, I can only really point out what you have already stated in your personal remarks. In particular I think the contrast between the sides of the hill is a bit too strong, and the hill appears much steeper than it is.

[LordOfThePigs]

In addition to the other two comments, I think the color is a little too saturated. It looks a little bit like toyland. But each of your submission looks better than the previous one. Keep up the good work!

[GeekToo]

Thanks for the feedback, I'm trying to work on the comments. I've changed the Blender file according to it, and come up with something like this. I think it's still a little too yellow, but apart from that I think it's nice. Still have to find out how it works out in the game, as I've learned that with 64px sprites, repeating tiles can give some ugly effects.

[Roujin]

owoaaaaaah this looks really nice! apart from that one misaligned tile its really really awesome!!!

[Wacki]

Yes, it is really cool!!!

[PluueeR]

It's always sunny in the OpenTTD world. So yellowish grass is like pretty natural

[Psistorm]

I agree with the posts above, that looks awesome!
dying to see that ingame

[athanasios]

Very nice. Yellowish tint is not bad, I like it too: better not change it. Sun shining... Concentrate on fixing repeated patterns that might look weird as you said.

[Jupix]

Yes, that looks exceedingly awesome.

[GeekToo]

Thanks for all the nice comments.

Still not finished, just to keep you posted:
The level tile gave a nasty repeating pattern as I suspected it would do, I tried to reduce that, but the better the tile is tileable without pattern, the more 'boring' it looks.
Furthermore I converted some blender renders to game sprite, so the following is an in-game screenshot.
At last I added a bottom hill tile, the one on the south, the rest still needs to be done.
So, there's more to come!

[LordOfThePigs]

It's pretty nice. But I think this time the color is a bit under-saturated to fit the OTTD world properly. Try using something in the middle of what you have now and what you had before. The shading looks great.

[PPT]

I was going to say hat the original game's grass isn't blurry or pea soup-ish and looks good,

But,

the latest grass that you posted (aug 16 @ 6:12) is starting to look very good.

Possibly, it could be a bit more green.

A question though.
Will the lack of grid lines make it more difficult to decide where to lay track?

[GeekToo]

It's always sunny in the OpenTTD world. So yellowish grass is like pretty natural

Very nice. Yellowish tint is not bad, I like it too: better not change it. Sun shining..

It's pretty nice. But I think this time the color is a bit under-saturated to fit the OTTD world properly. Try using something in the middle of what you have now and what you had before. The shading looks great.

Possibly, it could be a bit more green.

Hmm, do you see my problem ? Better wait for some more feedback. So what's it gonna be: more green or yellowish as it is?

[Kanibal]

I like it, maybe it's not saturated enough for the current graphics, but they are all being done, so maybe it could by turned down a bit, make it all less saturated.

[athanasios]

Because this argument will never end:
Please finish first all the tiles. Then we can check for mismathcing ones, fix ugly spots etc.
After we discuss about hue and saturation. That is not a problem. Just a snap in photoshop, gimp or whatever you use.

[PPT]

The original grass is greener and the green trees look good against it, as do the brown trees.

In your version the yellow and brown are strong enough to hurt the appearance of the brown trees.
So I think making the grass greener will work with both the green and brown trees.

I think many of the buildings will benefit from being surrounded by more green as well.

It's not a matter of just taste in grass color, it has to do with the entire integrated color balance.

Also, have you noticed how dreary Locomotion looks with it's brownish grass, as opposed to the happy feel of OTTD with it's green?

[GeekToo]

Because this argument will never end:
Please finish first all the tiles. Then we can check for mismathcing ones, fix ugly spots etc.
After we discuss about hue and saturation. That is not a problem. Just a snap in photoshop, gimp or whatever you use.

I agree, that fixing the tiling effect (ugly repeating tiles) has the highest priority at the moment, and that's exactly what I am busy with at the moment, and it is pretty difficult, but step by step I'm getting there.

But it is OK I think to do some concurrent engineering, and discuss the hue, cause that is going to be the next step, and finetuning the pngcodecs( just made an rough estimate while pngcodecing, so the alignment of some tiles is not exact).

I did do some Gimping tonight, and made some progress: the bottom hill tiles and top hill tiles are converted to sprites. The level tile is improved for repeating ( some tiling effect is still present, but when I reduce that even more, the tile is too blurry imo, and the tiling effect is not really annoying anymore.)

[LordOfThePigs]

I don't think there is any need to fix the tiling effect, the original tiles have it (check the background of this site, there are long vertical lighter lines that run vertically. I think it's nice as it is.

Here's my own take for the color of the grass:

a little bit darker (-10% or so)
a little bit more saturated (+20% or so)
color balance adjusted (-5% red, +5% green, +6% blue)

I also separated the grass in your picture in a separate overlay, for people to play around with is easily.

[jungle]

I like the new grass a lot - but with the tiling effect I think you are probably on a hiding to nothing trying to get rid of it completely. 64x64 is just too small not to have some sort of noticeable pattern. Ideally (although this would require coding as well as graphics) we could have a few slightly different tiles selected at random, and that would almost entirely wipe out the repeating patterns. But that would be a lot of work to wipe out what looks in the screenshots like a pretty minor issue.

On the colour choices - LordofthePigs's colour scheme is probably closer to the original TTD, so personally I'd initially go for that, even though I actually think the other 'yellowish' colour scheme looks far more realistic for grassland in summer... there's really nothing to stop the grass going into a new climate/graphic set in the future.