WIP Partaharju (public road)

[Kennett Ylitalo]

Making a good chromakey is tough sometimes, it's very sad that alpha is not usable always just like Johannes said. And the 1-bit chormakey is not always easy to do, just like 1-bit alpha channel. The key of having no outline tracing is to make the chromakey color very close to what ever color is dominant in the texture and trying to avoid that chromakey value in the visible part. For those snowy trees, i would use light grey chromakey, possibly tinted to blue or green, something like 220/220/230, experimentation is the only way there. The dds compression does fuzzy the border colors abit, that's is why it should be very close to dominant color. But it's not at all bad what you've done already. I don't know how GIMP works, never used it, but i do remember hearing about problems with transparency from users.

 

[jtbo]

Quite amusing, I did manage to fix those floating pieces of snow, but solution was quite different that one would first thought.

I did select transparent background with magic wand tool, then I inverted the selection, copied selection to clipboard, pasted it into PowerPoint, Scaled image down to 63% in PowerPoint and made a copy of it, then copied again to clipboard and pasted as new image to gimp, no more problem with floating snow!

Then I added new layer, moved it to behind, applied bucket fill to that layer RGB 232, 232, 232, but this is no good yet, even as I use chroma and pick correct color there is box around the tree, so in GIMP I did select only alpha channel of layer which tree image was on, then right clicked alpha channel and selected selection from channel, so I had tree selected perfectly, then I hide layer tree was on, activated layer of chroma color and inverted selection, after that with eraser tool using options of hard edge and large brush I did removed chroma color so that there was only shape of tree left, after that did unhide all layers and merged all layers, exported to dxt5 format and it actually works now with good shadows and all.

In Xpacker I chose shadows to be low and texture, now with max shadows setting there is no errors or issues that I can see of.

Well, except photo used for texture could be better, texture is really huge for a tree, also center of two trees are not properly set, that is of course because tree was not enough straight, but I think that could be fixed at image editor if user would be talented enough, I'm not. Oh and tree itself is quite huge too, I don't think that they will come much bigger than that, but with scaling you can easily make smaller versions naturally. At least lowest branches are what I think should be removed and put some kind of trunk there, or just removed.

You can horrify yourselfs with this, oh and icon is with black background because I was too lazy to change, but I think white would not be too good with snowy tree:
http://jtbo.pp.fi/tiedostot/rfactor/FinnishWinter.zip

So now I can actually try and make some trees for this track and I did wrote it up here so when I forgot, I can come and check how to do it, maybe useful for someone else too

edit: I just realized that those black lines at top and black outlines at tree does appear only when I tick box 'receive light', shadows seem not to have anything to do with that, but of course trees should receive light, again problem and I think it might still is texture to blame.

 

[Kennett Ylitalo]

Black lines on top of transparent image is usually a result of graphics engine diffusing the border between top and bottom. It does that to make tiled patterns more even. The trick is to modify the texture so that the bottom row of pixels is 100% transparent. Don't know if it is this bug/feature, in Evo "receive light tick" has no effect (it has only one light source).

I have to say sorry, i forgot to mention about using alpha layer selection and painting the chromakey with that.. It's so standard procedure that it slipped past.

lol, GIMP -> Powerpoint -> GIMP .. Well, what ever works.. Couldn't you open a new project in GIMP and use that instead PP? I'm not using gimp but i would think that every image editing software uses tabs.

 

[jtbo]

This is free for anyone to do anything with it, just remember that textures I have used are not mine, but are those free to use BTB textures and their makers should be credited.

I have pretty much moved to rF2 now and unless there is BTB for rF2 I doubt that I will make any tracks for rF2. This road would be however nice stage for rallying, so anyone interest to make it can do it.