[32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

[SyberSycho]

The other thought I had about greyscale was that it could make the tiling less of an issue, but I understand your reasoning for wanting to keep it coloured as well as the priority of getting other things done first.

[V453000 :)]

Tbh I do not understand how could greyscale help tiling but it would probably get less disturbing...

Yesterday I made v2 (quickly deleted), and afterwards v3 of Tubular bridges. In the morning when I saw the outcome, I have already written down almost 10 new sub-tasks how to actually get them to work But expect nice bridges. :>

[SyberSycho]

I didn't mean it would fix tiling just make it less of an issue because it would blend in more (aka making it less disturbing). Really though I'm sure whatever your final version is I will enjoy as I do with all your work. Looking forward to the future of this graphics set.

[V453000 :)]

Speaking of future, I have been working on something very futuristing for the last week. Here come the new tubular bridges!

They are particularly interesting on the side of how I technically solved it, but I will describe that in detail on the future BRIX wiki after I make the first release.

For now, I will just post 3 screenshots showing how it went.

In 2nd version you can also notice that I changed the light settings. I am using a basic 3-point light system now with some yellow highlights and blue shadows, it makes things look a lot better; I will re-render everything with that lighting setup now ... just a matter of CPU doing the job since I got everything automated.

What do you guys think? Are those bridges something you would use as the final futuristic bridge?

[SyberSycho]

Those are amazing and far exceeded anything I imagined.

I did notice how the tracks on the ramps don't line up with the tracks on the ground or the main part of the bridges properly but I'm sure you are well aware of that already.

[R2T9]

I like the 3rd one best. The first version is a little too dark. The second version is nice, but the third one seems to fit. The red, blue and yellow look nice against the gray background.

I'm not a fan of the dynamited holes under the bridges though. But overall, nice work! Can't wait to see more!

Side question: How are your other sets going? YETI, DOOM, and CATS? Or are all your energies focused on BRIX?

[V453000 :)]

Glad you like it

... yeah I am aware of the wtf going on at the bridge heads, I will probably be fixing that today.

R2T9: it is just to show the progress, the third one is of course the final one

The dynamited holes may change at some point, but for now I like them. I already realized that when you mass-dynamite and build on top of it, it is very hard to see your tracks...

YETI needs coding new functions and I was starting to add 4 new industries to it ... did not even finish the first one yet though perhaps someday

DOOM ended in testing phase ... today I believe that the correct approach to OpenTTD is to make things smaller, not bigger.

CATS is not moving anywhere because the coder did not even finish bringing newgrf stations to NML. Graphics for the cargoes are done, some basic platforms as well ... though those and some buildings would still need a lot of work.

NUTS is kind of done, but I should remove the 32bpp parts except slugs. They look s*** in compare to the 8bpp ones, just increase file size, and make the set even more inconsistent than it was.

BRIX is full-on right now. I do not have much time in total so I cannot afford to split my attention into multiple projects.

However, once BRIX reaches some solid state, I want to make a new super-amazing train set, which is now in conceptual phase, I already did some work on it before I revived BRIX ... but the tests showed that I needed to change some of the ideas, now it has some good concept ... just need TIME

moar BRIX coming soon

[Alberth]

Maybe the bridge pillars should be dropped? Springs can support themselves!

[V453000 :)]

Yeah I think I will do that for most of the bridges actually

[R2T9]

That's too bad about DOOM...thought it looked cool. Just curious, have you ever thought about doing a 32bpp ship set? Keep up the good work!

[SyberSycho]

However, once BRIX reaches some solid state, I want to make a new super-amazing train set, which is now in conceptual phase, I already did some work on it before I revived BRIX ... but the tests showed that I needed to change some of the ideas, now it has some good concept ... just need TIME

So is this a separate train set entirely from what the BRIX trains will be? If so can I get a hint at the style of it? Like realism or a little bit NUTS?

[V453000 :)]

We shall see, the first version may very well be literally placeholder bricks XD But in general I will probably stylize everything into BRIX style because I really like it a lot and I think it is the way to go about OpenTTD graphics.

[V453000 :)]

That's too bad about DOOM...thought it looked cool. Just curious, have you ever thought about doing a 32bpp ship set? Keep up the good work!

Short answer: no.

Long asnwer: All of my NewGRFs have some functions/concepts with which they rather majorly influence the gameplay of OpenTTD, and bring something new to it / expand it somehow. I do not believe there is enough options for that to be done with ships, so I will probably never make a standalone ship NewGRF. But of course BRIX will overwrite default ship graphics at some point.

[R2T9]

Ah. I guess my rationale was that there are so few ships in the game that they really don't serve a purpose. FISH seems to be the only ship grf out there, but it's not in 32bpp. Any chance you could add a few new ships into BRIX?

[V453000 :)]

Yo fellow human species!

Them BRIX got some more love lately. New stuff:
* everything re-rendered multiple times, figuring out lighting setup
* slopes made more visible (easier to orientate in where is hill/...)
* new city roads
* new road crossings
* new road tunnels
* new pillars for bridges (suspension, cantliever, tubular)
* some fixes to the bridge heads and aligning to tracks (still needs work)
* tons of under the hood postproduction work, causing less glitches and stuff
* different recolour mask for cantliever bridges to make them less stupidly bright, especially in red version

Long description:

Because with the bridges I started using new light setup (a kind of 3-point lighting), I needed to re-render everything to fit the new environment. This took about 3 attempts and now I am quite happy with how the lights work.

To better see what is it actually doing in final form, I exaggerated the slope shading by adjusting the materials in the 3D scene slightly. I think it looks a lot better and a lot more plastic, but it will probably still need further tweaking and even more exaggeration. The rear shadows are probably still a bit too soft.

After that I did some more fixes at bridges, from all kinds of technical problems all the way to bridge pillars. I decided that only suspension, cantliever and tubular bridges will have pillars, as the small ones look really weird and glitchy with them.
The suspension bridge in particular is very problematic as you can see in the picture here. Admittedly you do not build a road like this too often, but still. The worst part is that there is not much to be done about it unless quite majorly changing the model itself. Might do that at some point. For now it is probably ok.
Cantliever and tubular both have very basic concrete-like pillars, I think it looks best to keep them simple.

Independently from bridges, I also did some work on city roads, added slabs and side walks to them (the side walk is an actual city tile). The tile plates are a bit too big when zoomed in, but look nice in x1 so I will probably keep them for now, perhaps with some extra texture inside of them for better x4. They do not align properly for some very weird reason, but I will find out eventually.
After city roads were done at least in this current state, I could make road crossings rather easily. In the picture you can see both normal and city road crossings.

Later, I did some serious fixes to how rail tunnels were made. In static pictures they look the same but their overlays did not include the ground, making trains visible through it. So I fixed how they render and their postproduction... and when done with that, I added road tunnels in the same way.

For some random reason I made water a lot more lively colour and it made me think about the colours a lot more in general.
Since I have most of the stuff automated (render from 3D to PNGs, post-producing the PNGs to actual spritesheets), it should not be terribly complicated to make various colour-theme versions of BRIX.
The desaturated idea is nice and I still think it will work great, but I can completely understand that not everybody wants to use that, and that it is a lot more experimental and special, rather than "normal".
The current plan is that I will have some colour schemes like:
* desaturated
* happy colours
* "serious" colours
* other (desert-styled/whatever)

While the plan is cute, there are still hurdles to overcome:
* how to change all of the materials in 3D quickly and easily, and eventually even render them to various folders (not as easy as it sounds)
* how to post-produce rendered sprites and handle the various outputs
* how to compile the grf with one NML file.
Currently I imagine that the 3D materials will be the biggest problem. In blender nodes I would know how to make a tree of conditions with an easy control, but in max I so far don't.
I so far plan to simply use one folder for the renders, for example render all of desaturated version, postproduce it into sprites, and then move both the renders and the spritesheets into a folder like RENDER/desaturated and sprites/desaturated. And after that render for example happy colour scheme, and do everything the same way again.
There are certainly some problems, one of them being that rendering one version of BRIX takes around 20 hours at the moment. And then there is the human factor where I could make stupid mistakes or forgetting stuff.

Here it is. A lot of progress has been done, even more awaits.

... ships will come eventually but I do not know when. Btw ships do not serve a purpose not because there is not many of them, but because they are trivial and boring to build.

V

[R2T9]

Sweet! Really like the way the set is progressing. The bridges look nice. Train tracks need a little work, especially at the 45 degree turns (the wooden ties get partly cut off). Maybe it's just me, but I feel like the road edges might look nicer when they are straighter and less blocky?

[lukasz1985]

That looks good, for me especially that the ground is not dull and gray, and the water looks fun .
About the bugs I've noticed on your screenshot - looking at the brdige at the bottom-left side of your screenshot I can see you got two shadows from distinct light sources. Perhaps that's not what you want (unless you're trying to convince players, they build on a planet that has two suns )? There are also smaller inconsistencies (though nothing really bad), like the road tunnel south-east entrance's shadow is not at the same angle as e.g. shadows from trees.

About the automation stuff:
First thing I would tell you to do is to get into programming a little - the Python for example would serve you well - postprocessing scripts (like trimming spirtes) can be done very easy. If you want to compile more NML files into a single and then feed it into NML compiler - Python would serve you too. When working on my set, I was using this extensively. This would not only make your work easier but also would yield more deterministic results, if you were using it for example for saturating sprites - there would be less space for error than when doing same things in 3DSMax. For compiling the the sprites you could later use GNU make tool, like Zephyris did for his zBase set.

One more advice: do a backup if you haven't already, really don't ignore this. Sh** happens (especially can happen with your mammoth files )

[Alberth]

Great work V!

While looking at the new picture, I find the SE road tunnel too similar with the road, it took a while before understanding it was a tunnel as well.
The SW one seems fine, due to the darker area in front of it.

The train tunnel has the same colour, but there it's not a problem due to the orange-ish colour of the track bed.


The style of the "springy" bridge is very different from the very traditional style of the other bridges, doesn't seem to match?


I like the roads with the light-grey sprinkles in it. The city sideways also look great. I pondered about anti-aliasing of the center white line in the curves, but with the blocky sytle, the current solution would seem better.

I like the current water colour, but I am not sure about the colour before. I looked through the screen shots of the thread, and the only other one with water was at the very first post with very grey land, and black water. The current light grey and sea-blue water looks very pretty to me.

In all, great progress!!

PS I spotted a wood-chopping yeti, does he have permission to do that?

[SyberSycho]

Because with the bridges I started using new light setup (a kind of 3-point lighting), I needed to re-render everything to fit the new environment. This took about 3 attempts and now I am quite happy with how the lights work.

To better see what is it actually doing in final form, I exaggerated the slope shading by adjusting the materials in the 3D scene slightly. I think it looks a lot better and a lot more plastic, but it will probably still need further tweaking and even more exaggeration. The rear shadows are probably still a bit too soft.

I think the shading looks perfect how it is. Not to soft/light or hard/dark.

For some random reason I made water a lot more lively colour and it made me think about the colours a lot more in general.
Since I have most of the stuff automated (render from 3D to PNGs, post-producing the PNGs to actual spritesheets), it should not be terribly complicated to make various colour-theme versions of BRIX.
The desaturated idea is nice and I still think it will work great, but I can completely understand that not everybody wants to use that, and that it is a lot more experimental and special, rather than "normal".
The current plan is that I will have some colour schemes like:
* desaturated
* happy colours
* "serious" colours
* other (desert-styled/whatever)

Colour choices sounds pretty awesome.

Sweet! Really like the way the set is progressing. The bridges look nice. Train tracks need a little work, especially at the 45 degree turns (the wooden ties get partly cut off). Maybe it's just me, but I feel like the road edges might look nicer when they are straighter and less blocky?

I personally love the stylized roads.

----------------------------------------

As for road tunnels I agree that they kind of blend in a bit to much. My idea would be to stylize them a bit like the road and change the colour to something like one of the colours in this image here. That way they separate themselves from the road grey a little more while not being overly eye catching. The train tunnels are better but could also benifit from a bit more of a stylized look/slight colour change.

[V453000 :)]

First of all, thank you for all the comments, I greatly appreciate them!

...like...nice...work...45 degree...wooden ties...cut off. ..road edges...straighter and less blocky?

Thanks glad you like it, I do as well. The wooden slepers getting cut off is going to happen always, that is how the tiles work. The only thing to solve it is to either make the sleepers less visible to hide the effect, or remove sleepers entirely to "fix" it ... neither option is great so this will probably stay. Other sleeper-less track types will not have this issue though The roads look great to me and I think they would lack detail and become quite dull if I removed the edges. The edges also demonstrate bricks as a trademark of the set.

That looks good, for me especially that the ground is not dull and gray, and the water looks fun .
About the bugs I've noticed on your screenshot ...a planet that has two suns ... the road tunnel south-east entrance's shadow is not at the same angle as e.g. shadows from trees.

About the automation stuff:
...Python...doing same things in 3DSMax.... GNU make

backup...Sh**...your mammoth

Oh yes, result of the 3-sun lighting setup XD I will make only one sun cast shadows. The shadows of everything is different from trees at the moment. It is to give trees some extra length of shadows while other things don't really have space in their tiles for any kind of long shadows. I kind of like such solution ... the trees with longer shadows feel are lot more plastic.

Python has been on my radar for a while now, I will definitely learn at least some basics at some point. Thing with recolouring/desaturating is that I don't actually want to straight up desaturate/recolour. I need to keep the light effects, 100% desaturated looks dead / dull and gray. I prefer to do this properly (with best visual output) ... today I realized how to do the material switches in max, it will be great and more or less easy, so this problem is ok.

I will see what GNU make does, but I assume some sort of abilities like include etc.

I make backups all the time, and sometimes also push to devzone. Once for BRIX so far...

Thanks for the hints, they are super helpful and/or make me think about stuff, I appreciate it a lot.

...SE road tunnel too similar with the road...

...train tunnel has the same colour...

...style of the "springy" bridge is very different... doesn't seem to match?

...roads...city sideways...white line in the curves...blocky sytle, the current solution would seem better.

...water colour, but I am not sure about the colour before...

In all, great progress!!

PS I spotted a wood-chopping yeti, does he have permission to do that?

Yeah, I will do some changes to the tunnels in general, but with roads it indeed is sort of confusing.

The idea of tubular bridges was to actually be super modern in compare to the older ones. I feel like when you play the game, you basically have the cantlievers since the start in vanilla, while tubulars come pretty late in compare. I like the feel of the game turning from "traditional" to more "futuristic", in that regard I feel like they fit.

I like the state of roads a lot and totally agree that the central line in curves simply fits the style.

Haha, true that I did not actually post water colour screenshots previously XD had to look at my screenshot folder, none. But it was this:

brix-oldwater.png (24.71 KiB) Viewed 4759 times

for comparison, just photoshopping it, you can see it here: http://www.tt-forums.net/download/file.php?id=189120 (post attachment)

Wood chopping yeti is enslaved by dark forces, poised to ruin the world. More coming in BRIX lore book you can buy for mere 200$ in the coming exclusive Vstore.

I think the shading looks perfect how it is. Not to soft/light or hard/dark.

.

In more complex areas it sometimes get a bit tough to see... this stuff is quite hard to imagine so I will just have to try.

Everybody, thank you for your comments. They are helpful, a lot.