City Textures rework

Thanks Shessi and Daniel.

Ive downloaded the new water colours mod and am keen to try it out, though it would probably mean editing all the fake water textures to match, a minor inconvenience.

I tried adding specular files to the fake water textures similar to the aircraft files but they don't seem to work for building textures, unless I'm doing something wrong.

This afternoon I created an urban mos file texture to facilitate the addition of small terrace housing strips to be added to central London and the dock areas. It will probably mean a lot of global layer entries which I hope doesn't affect the framerate.

Another small update was reducing the size of roads and dirt roads on my 'Forest and field texture'. This landclass replacement texture makes a big difference to the countryside and works well as a border for city and town textures.

A part of the texture is visible here:

cfs3-2024-06-29-18-29-32.jpg


Hillary Hahn is one of my favourite violinists along with Janine Jansen, Maxim Vengerov and Patricia Kopatchinskaja.

A younger Hillary performing Prokofiev's magical 1st violin concerto.

 
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Looks good!

Specular textures should work for buildings as well as any other model. I am not a modeler, so I can't help with how to put it into the model properly, but I know the material needs to have some specular properties added for any effect to show. This also goes for the other way to add a specular texture, which is to simply create a texture using the following naming convention YourMainTextureNameWithoutExtension.+sr.dds. Bump maps (normal maps) can be added the same way using YourMainTextureNameWithoutExtension.+nm.dds.
 
Okaaay! I've used '.+nm.dds' to successfully create aircraft bump map textures in the past, and I unsuccessfully tried some other extension for the water texture reflection. I'll try '.+sr.dds', thanks.
 
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This is what I mentioned in post #261, a series of urban facility/mos models which could be terraced houses or a mix of housing and factories, small enough to fit in between major roads and railway lines. This one still needs the terraced houses to be added. This will be without trees, ideal for docks and city centre areas, where trees need to be reduced. I can change the grass background areas to a grey industrial look which will cause it to stick out a bit. These are smaller versions of my large city mos/facility models and they work nicely with the landclass city textures. Maybe I need to build a large city block model, sh1t! this is already getting out of hand.:rolleyes:

cfs3-2024-06-30-19-32-34.jpg
 
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Yes!! this is exactly the water colour I have wanted for so long now. It should also improve aircraft visibility. Thank you Daniel, this just made my day.

cfs3-2024-06-30-20-35-37.jpg
 
Great, glad you like it! One thing to note if you're trying to match the water color in your textures is that the sky, clouds, sun, and horizon fog color all influence the color of the water dynamically. If you pull your water color from the applicable part of the water colors texture, and then match the specular properties of the water in the water portions of your model, it should come out more or less right under any conditions. I believe the specular properties of the water are 100% reflective, but I could be wrong.
 
If you pull your water color from the applicable part of the water colors texture, and then match the specular properties of the water in the water portions of your model, it should come out more or less right under any conditions.
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In the past I've used a screenshot taken from the applicable area to create the texture, but I've always had to manually edit the texture to get it to match properly because of the lack of specularity. I must still fiddle with a specular map texture.
 
This river colour is going to take some getting used to.

With the aid of specular and glossiness settings in gmax as well as the .+sr.dss extension I was able to add reflection to the water texture. The trick is to have water and water texture reflections working seamlessly, which is going to take a lot of tweaking and jumping from gmax to the sim and back, a bit of a distraction from what I really want to be doing. On the other hand I have added specularity to a 3dmax scene in the past but this is the first time adding specularity to a game object, which is a good learning experience.

cfs3-2024-07-01-19-05-32.jpg
 
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Yeah that is clearly very tricky. I was definitely wrong about 100% specular. Let me do some asking around.

Those dockyards look great though.
 
That water tex is much better than the Poster paint blue lol!

Looks like Tilbury Docks, with the angle to the Thames, good stuff.

Cheers

Shessi
 
"This river colour is going to take some getting used to." Pretty clean looking compared with the real thing back then,; even now in fact. :wiggle:
 
Incredible work!

mongoose said:
"This river colour is going to take some getting used to." Pretty clean looking compared with the real thing back then,; even now in fact. :wiggle:
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Man, I was really going for a dirty look to the Thames, and that's clean? Must be bad indeed.
 
It's difficult to relinquish my childhood fantasy of England during the Bob, all lush green fields, sparkling blue rivers and not a speck of soot in sight;)

A few years back I created a Westminster Abbey model for Bob2Wov and was horrified when politely and correctly informed that it was too clean and should be covered with a layer of soot.
 
Once you remove vestiges of the old bright blue colour the river colour looks good. Just completed colour matching the Commercial dock and it works better with this river colour. The dock water colour could probably be slightly darker.

i would like to do something about the modern day dock on the left, maybe cover it with a textured field plane, though it may cause shading issues, we'll see.

cfs3-2024-07-03-13-06-11.jpg
 
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Much better. Now the problem of white 'surf'. IIRC Dan and or maybe I, re did that to a more neutral colour, (not white), although it could be the same colour as the river The ? is that also effects the seas, which for me is not as bad as 'surf' in rivers.
 
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