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Grass with GMax

ras78

ras78

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374
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italy
Hi,
on avsim I've found a grass texture enanchment for FS. Basically it's a dark texture with alpha channel with little "strips" b&w. I think it will used as bump mapping. If I would do the same thing with gmax, have I to assign a bump mapping to my object? Have I to place it to the same layer of my ground? Anyone tryied this technique?
 
Unfortunately current FS version do not support bump mapping. Alpha channel is used for transparency in scenery and reflections in aircrafts. To make a ground polygons you'll have to use FS2002 gamepack. Take a look in Wiki for tutorial.
 
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Can you give us a link to the grass texture you talk about? I am curious to see what purpose it has, if it is indeed black-and-white :).
 
Seems to be a normal ground texture. Did you think it is some sort of 3D-grass? I have never seen this in FS2004 yet. For my last project I experimented a lot with 3D-grass, but it wouldn't look like it should.
My idea was this:

Placing a semi-transparent grass-texture some inches above the ground texture, so when you move around it seems as the grass moves. But it didn't look good.

Maybe anyone has a good idea for grass?


edit: You're right, Arno. I only took a look at the thumb at avsim. The texture seems to be some sort of noise.
 
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OK, looks like a sort of bump/noise texture indeed. But this is not something that can be done with each texture in FS. I think it is something that is hardcoded in the mesh scenery engine somewhere and some parts use these detail textures.

So you can't create something like this for your own textures, unless you use the same mesh techniques as the default grass I guess (and then you would get the same noise texture as well of course).
 
Hey, they did it. :eek:

Looks nice, but of course only from the side. :laughing:

If you want realistic grass textures, take your camera into the garden. ;)
As you can see in the pic it's hard to catch the right scale for the grass. At Tampa it looks to me like the scale is multiplied by 10...
But if anybody succeds in making realistic grass, I'd be the first to thank him. :)
 
I've seen that sort of bump-mapping texture for grass in Boston Logan v2 free scenery...
 
Did some tests for detailed grass in my EDDF scenery. This is what came out:

http://www.scenerydesign.deutsche-al.com/screenshots/09_02_2006/09_02_06.JPG
(External, because of the image size)

Still some need to rework it. There are some parts in the texture, that cause a tile effect.

I used a texture of about 512 x 512px and mapped it several times in UVW directions. Don't know the number of tiles now, sry. But I think it was 512px = 50cm (Not really sure about this :o )
 
That looks good, Daniel. :)

How about giving it a 80%transparency, so that you can see the ground-texture blend through. That may prevent the monotone look.
 
Had the same idea after I tested the groundpoly with this texture, but no time to import it into fs (I moved the groundpoly a bit, so the grass is a bit out of position as it was only a test. You'll see concrete shining through, no grass). I'll try it this evening and report it here with some pictures.

For those who might be interested: As Horst already said, I took my cam and made some photos in the garden, then I used the clone tool in my graphics programm to kill some parts of the photo to prevent the tiling effect. After this, i moved the texture about 256 to the right and to the bottom (with duplicated layers, to have one in the background), to get a seamless texture.

The groundpoly with the grass texture is about 0.01m above the groundlayer and has a different layer number (groundlayer 4, grass 6), to prevent problems.
 
Hi Daniel,

Is the extra height to get a nice visual looks? Because setting them on the same altitude should not give any trouble (as long as they are layered correctly).
 
Sry for not answering your question arno. Real life was a real challenge for me. My grandmother passed away and there where a lot of things to manage.

Well, the extra height wasn't meant to get a better visual look. It was a relic from my work with 3d programs. To avoid a bleed through when adding an extra dirt layer (Not a second material for the object, real polys just like we do it in our sceneries) on top of -for example- a road I gave them a higher position in the y-axis (0,1 cm or so).

But maybe I can figure out, if this extra hight gives better visual looks for our sceneries. I'll test it in the next days.
 
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Hi Daniel,

Sorry to hear that.

About the layering. If you use a LayerCall (ADDCAT) command with them, there is no need for the extra height. This command already makes sure the drawing order is correct.

I don't know how the scenery engine does this, could be that it uses a offset altitude (zbias) for this, as I know other applications do it like that. But there is no need to do this yourself.
 
Not sure if this is what u guys meant but I made a patch of 3d grass using the "hair" tutorial.


3dgrass2.jpg

3dgrass1.jpg

http://www.webdesign.org/3d-graphics/tutorials/low-poly-grass-and-hair.543.html
 
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