Improving ages

[Justintime9]

I've just finished my first successful age (it isn't much tho) and i was wondering... how can i make it better? if i set the texture to stretch over the whole thing, it's too stretched. if i make it tiled, it looks too tiled. how can I make my textures look just as awesome as Cyan's ages? and, how do people make animated skies, and water?

[andylegate]

One thing I can suggest is that you upload your Age so that others can take a stroll in it. You'll find that the Maintainers are more than willing to loaded it up and take notes. We don't flame either, we offer constructive critiques and offer advice, and kudos too.

My opinion on textures. Make it big enough to fit if you don't want a tiled look, or make it seamless. Depending on what you are texturing will help you decide on how to texture it.

As far as the animations, I haven't gotten into that, so I don't know if there are any tutorials. But I do think I saw some discussion here on the forum about them.

[Trylon]

Whoa, you ask a lot Justin
We currently can't do animated skies and realistic water - wish we could
On the topic of textures I can give you some advice.

"Too tiled or too stretchy" - yup, that describes one of the main problems with realtime textures.
A good example of how to improve this is found in the desert - the cleft.

The desert texture is actually two texture layers one really stretched, and one detailed (has much alpha, and mostly puts in the pebbly detail).

You can do this in blender/pyprp too. You need to make a basic uv/map that can be used for both textures first.
Then you go to the materials tab, and make sure you have two texture layers (image).
In the materials panel, you have for each texture "a Map input" and a "Map to" (or similar names)
In the map input, you can scale the individual texture up, in both X and Y directions, so you can make one texture very stretched, and the other very detailed.
(You can use the Z value, to add a multiplication factor to these values, like - if Xscale = 10, and Zscale is 2, the real scale used for X is 10 X 2 = 20)

[Justintime9]

Hmm... Interesting, are u saying that on one layer, it's stretched, and the other i'ts detailed, and tiled? o, and try to make your directions like you were explaining it to a 3 year old, I just recently learned how to add textures throughh UV Mapping, and I don't reely know the terms and stuff... so try not to be vague... hehe, i never would've guessed that cyan used 2 textures O, and i also noticed, in kemo, and pplaces like that, it looks like cyan used stenciling, but URU doesn't let us add stenciling in our ages... so how does cyan gradually Make a rock texture fade into a moss texture, and stuff like that?

[Vamp]

O, and i also noticed, in kemo, and pplaces like that, it looks like cyan used stenciling, but URU doesn't let us add stenciling in our ages... so how does cyan gradually Make a rock texture fade into a moss texture, and stuff like that?

Well, you pretty much answered your own question. Like Trylon said, there are two overlaying textures. Actually, if you look at some things in the game, you'll find there can be more than two. In the city, alot of the details of destruction (such as cracks) are actually an overlaying texture. These kinds of textures are somewhat transparent and so it kinda gives the underlying textures a more realistic feel to them. For instance, the cracks in the city are actually crack textures with transparency around them.

And how do you get a moss texture to gradually fade into a stone texture? I'd say it has something to do with texture mapping. I could be wrong, though.

[Lontahv]

They have an alpha channel of vertex paint, Justin.

[Trylon]

That too, but the cross-fading is done using a trick we can't replicate yet...

[Justintime9]

Ok... Um, Trylon, I tried doing wat u said, but some of it was confuzing to me, do u know where i can find a detailed tutorial of this?

[andylegate]

Justin, try looking at some of the Alcugs tutorials. They are specifically for Age building:

http://alcugs.almlys.org/wiki/index.php/AgeCreationTutorialsList

Take a look way at the bottom. You'll see two tutorials, one by Trylon and one by Aloys. They have very useful information about texturing, both UV mapping, and decal types.

Hope this helps

[Justintime9]

Say... How do u guys get Textures to fit so good? I mean, When I make a sky, there's a bunch of seams and stuff that can't be helped, but then when u guys make a sky it looks perfect what am I doing wrong? the same goes for Cylinders, it looks fine part of the way, but the rest is stretched horribly The Method I use to Map textures, is well, if it's a sphere I want to texture, I'll hit "U" and click the one about the sphere, but it'll be so stretched, so I go to the UV Image editor window, and select the unwraped object, and then hit "S" and make it better so I can adjust how much the texture repeats... it sometimes looks too tiled like that, and the Alcugs Texture tutorial is like a foreign Language to me