Updated Terrain Textures

[BrokenPillar]

I recently started playing with painting terrain, and so downloaded the "LeadwerksTerrainTextures1" pack from the download section. It is a very well made texture pack with a great variety of types, and does a great job of maintaining a cohesive look across all of the textures. However, I noticed a couple of things that appeared odd to me and so I spent a little time over the last few days updating them to better suit my needs.

 

First, the diffuse textures appear to be saved as DXT5, and so have a blank white alpha and are twice as big as they need to be. Re-opening and saving them as DXT1 reduced the file size of the textures in the pack by approx 23 MB.

 

Second, the normal maps have a lot of dark pixels scattered across them:

 

*edit* Third, the spec maps are too bright. I am used to seeing values similar to those in the terrain textures for materials like metal, etc. From my experience, things like dirt and stone should almost be black.*edit*

 

Fourth, most of them appear to be fairly "flat". This is ok if that is your style choice, but for my purposes I want them to appear a little more dimensional, so I added some depth to them. Here are some comparisons of the textures before and after (sorry for the image sizes, they're animated gifs) Click on them to see the animation, which shows before and after shots:

 

 

and some comparisons of them used in a very simple scene:

 

 

Anyway, I have cleaned up these issues on all but a few. I am more than happy to upload them to the download section, but didn't want to step on Josh's toes if he doesn't want them there since the originals are his. If he is ok with them being there, and if anyone else wants them, I will upload them so anyone can use them that wants to.

 

*edit* I finished updating them to my satisfaction, and fixed some things that were bothering me with my initial pass. I have updated the animated gifs above with the final textures. *edit*

[Pixel Perfect]

I commented on the black artifacts in the normal maps when these were first released but got no response, you seem to have done a nice job of cleaning them up and I think I like the overall effect of the increased depth. Nice job.

 

With regard to the DXT5 format on the diffuse, this was probably due to the fact that there used to be an issue with the quality of DXT1 files in the engine. I don't know if this is still the case.

 

Specular is generally overused by everyone. People seem to like this slightly unnatural shiny look to everything along with post processing the life out of scenes. Two of my pet hates in modern computer graphics I have had to dumb down a lot of the specular maps in the models I've bought from third party suppliers.

[BrokenPillar]

Thanks for the comments. They are about as far as I can take them without having the originals and without spending an insane amount of time trying to sculpt out the normals to match the diffuse. I wanted to clean them up, but didn't have the kind of free time laying around that sculpting them out would take. Plus, I sort of have a little issue with how some people tend to apologize for using Crazybump and/or Photoshop for normal maps. If you know how to use the tools appropriately, you can often get results that most non-industry professionals would have a hard time telling the difference between the map generated procedurally vs the map baked from a high res sculpt used in a game (that is just my opinion). Most of the assets I make have about equal parts high res bake and equal parts procedural generation in the end normal map. So I did this work entirely in Photoshop, trying to push the methods I knew of to generate higher quality normals a little bit and to learn some new ones, but still be able to do it all in a reasonable amount of time.

 

I agree with you about the tendency for people to make spec values too high. This coupled with HDR and Bloom can make for some very blown out/shiny scenes. I guess that comes down to a style preference though, which is subjective and depends on the result you are going for.

 

*edit* I do not mean for this to sound like I am taking credit for other people's work. Obviously the bulk of the work on these textures was done by some one else. However, I did recreate many of the updated normal maps from scratch using the diffuse texture, or combined elements made from scratch with the originals. I am only saying this to give people a better idea of what is possible using Photoshop by itself to generate normal maps. *edit*

[BrokenPillar]

I uploaded these to the Assets, Materials section in the Download area for anyone that wants to use them. They are named the same as the original textures that are in the download section, which are also the same as the ones that come with the SDK, so all you should have to do is copy them over the original textures and they should work.

[Flexman]

Thank you sir.

[Marleys Ghost]

Thanks BP, very nice of you.

[BrokenPillar]

No problem. I saw no reason to keep the updates to myself if other people can use them. I know a lot of people use them since everyone here is limited on time and resources.