![[Yautja]](http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/messaging/images/1/19/Avatar.jpg){kind=avatar}
User:Yautja
From Freeciv
16<12<04
Made some 256 sprite roads and rails (see image to the right), and got pretty bad RSI/OOS for a few days. Should buy a graphics tablet for christmas I suppose.
Rails look a little crappy but they'll do for now (couldn't keep the 8 sprite ones because roads and rails have to have the same sprite matching).
Only a few terrain tiles I havn't replaced yet (think I'll leave the ocean / coast for now, problably the best part of isotrident behind some of the units). I'll then release what I've done so far with isotrident as a fallback.
Trying for thin roads / rails and more easy to see irrigation / farmland. All the while still being able to tell what terrain is underneath. Used to have trouble even seeing if grassland was even irrigated in isotrident, or if it was plains or grassland underneath farmland + roads.
I'll have to thicken up the rivers to isotrident thickness (and some of the lakes are a little large), they're still too hard to see under irrigation + roads.
26<11<04
I've shifted focus to creating 3d terrain lately as I figure it takes up more screen estate compared to units.
Trying to make it as colourful as possible to get away from the blandness of isotrident (the pixelation / dithering drives me nuts aswell).
Been giving the specials antialiasing by overlaying them on their parent terrain tile and cutting around. Also been giving them rendered shadows the same way until I discovered it puts holes the underlying roads / rivers.
Finally managed to compile civworld thanks to the latest diff with cvs, planning to make a terrain / unit test map.
I currently just render to 384 x 192 (it gives integer multiples of 128x, 96x and 64x which stops colour bleed through when resizing montages) as there is no automatic way to change the render size from the commandline with blender (unless you export to an external renderer I suppose). Then I montage with imagemagik and re-touch/size with gimp.
Figured out the easiest way to make mountains / hills / rivers / roads, basically a greyscale height / displacement map, a render subdivided plane and colour band. Also very easy to change the parts with no displacement to alpha with this method.
Mountains could be improved with a seperate snow texture, as the current dosn't look too realistic. Also tried fancy joining of mountains and hills like civ 3 and fitting them perfectly within the tile, but didn't work as well as I hoped :(. Think I'll just remake them like the current isotridents with overlap on north and west edges, problem is it problably won't look good if you reorientate the camera for non-iso though :/.
Nearly replaced everything except ocean/shore & railroads. Still can't figure out a quick/easy way to make railroads (in the 32 image version), although there's a new object curve deform in the latest blender 2.35 ill have to try.
Stupid blender dosn't use relative paths for linked librarys imports (you can used them for textures and everything else but that). Hopefully will be fixed as I'm using seperate files for everything and linking the lights and camera from an external file. This means the files won't be portable unless they're stuck in the same directory I have them in :(.
Another thing is blender have just released a bunch of video tutorials (which I wish were there before I learnt everything the hard way), might be a quick alternative until demo/tutorial recording/playback is completed in the game for newbies. Static screens compress really well with the voice over taking up most the space. Only disadvantage is people learn better by doing stuff themselves.
