[WIP] Graphic pack: painterly textures

[nightblue]

For the last couple of nights I've been messing with the idea of making a graphic pack for RimWorld.  I'll probably be doing a few assets every night after work.  The focus will be on environment assets, especially ground textures and foliage.  Ideally, though, I'd like to get to creatures as well.


What I've done so far:
1st-pass repaint of soil, rich soil, and gravel textures.
Temporary pass on rough stone overlay (just chilled the existing one out)
Grass texture
Oak A, Oak B, Poplar tree A and the leafless versions

I will use this thread to document my snail progress.  Thanks in advance for your patience

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[damibonf]

Ooooooooh, those oaks sure seem interesting... nice job!

[Listen1]

Nice Job! Keep on the good work.

I like this idea, and also would really like to see the rock walls different

[Goldenpotatoes]

This is probably the first graphics pack I've seen that actually fits the artistic theme of Rimworld while looking better than the vanilla graphics.

Big

[Shinzy]

hm I would love to see lil bit green on the dirt the grass bushels seem to stick out little too much
But I adore how edible they all look

[mrofa]

All dats left is to redo the stone, as for grass i think it needs more coding thinkering since the art looks awsome

[nightblue]

hm I would love to see lil bit green on the dirt the grass bushels seem to stick out little too much
But I adore how edible they all look

Totally, I think I cranked up the saturation of the grass a bit too much.  This makes trees harder to read too.  Will tweak

Thanks all for the feedbacks and support!  Good call on doing the bush and rocks next.  Slowly but surely... looking forward to doing this tonight

[nightblue]

Today:
Bushes, Raspberry Bushes, Dandelions(A,B,C), rock low(A,B,C). debris stones (A, B), rubble
Tuned grass saturation down a bit so trees and bushes stand out more.



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[Listen1]

THE RUBBLE AND THE ROCKS LOOK AMAZING

Wow, nice work. The bushes even have little fruits.

[nightblue]

Thank you so much!

Tonight, tackled Rock Atlas.  Not completely happy with where it's at but consider it a first pass?  moving on.

I'll probably prioritize all tiles used by my current colony... because I'm self-serving, muhaha.  So crops will probably be next.



I may or may not be able to do more before next week, pending how I fare on an upcoming deadline


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[mrofa]

Can you make like 2 more rock atlas with the same connecting point ?
I got a dll that allows to use randome wall atlas.

[Alistaire]

You're using RGBA(255,255,255,0) for the backgrounds of your sprites which adds a white outline in-game due to anti-alias which is calculated
based on nearest neighbouring pixels. I got a video explaining how to fix it in my preferred graphics software.

[Listen1]

Nightblue, you worked with Airship Sindicate on Battle Chaser? I really love that game, once I save enough of it i'll probably buy. Gotta love some turn strategy rpg.

[skullywag]

was gonna mention the need for fixing the white outlines but Al beat me.

[nightblue]

@mrofa: Sure, I'll mess with a few wall variations.  I have no idea how tech side of things work yet, though, so prepare for a barrage of noob questions ^_^b

@Alistaire: I actually do fill the transparent parts with the same color as the outline in photoshop.  This usually gets rid of the outlines in most engines but for some reason not working here.  Any tips for photoshop?  I will look into paintfire, thanks a lot for your help.

This is what the tree sprite is saved as, with alpha channel indicating transparency.  The larger image on the right shows where transparency is, I turned the usually black/white grid to grey to preserve eyesight



edit: looking at it closer I think the whiteline might be caused by sorting issues when shadow overlaps the asset??  Which would mean definitely harden alpha edges... thinking out loud

@Flying Rockbass: Thanks   It's been a lot of fun to work on.

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Edit 2: got curious so I messed with this a little before work.  Hardened alpha to the point of pixelation (only black and white) but I don't think it's helping.

My theory:
the "halo" is caused by semi-transparent pixels (gray alpha) overlapping another transparent texture - the engine can't draw them properly so it just kinda skips them and draw the raw ground texture instead (or whatever opaque texture is underneath).  It happens when the tree overlaps a grass, or a shadow overlaps a tree. The game automatically mips down the tree textures, possibly due to them scaling according to growth %.  This cause the trees to have grey alpha edges even when the source art has only black and white alpha channel.

Possible fix:
slightly noise-up the ground texture so the halo is less noticeable I'm not a technical person and will probably just do this until rendering tech or mipping improves.



From the scaled-up screenshot, we can see that the unmodded art has similar sorting issues.  However, the noisier ground texture helped obscuring the effect.

I guessed at the mip/scale bits because grass particles and dandileons play nicely instead of causing trouble.  Their base texture size are small so the art didn't get scaled down.  Also, the halos are worse on younger (smaller) trees.

More theories/troubleshoots welcome   This is getting fun.