FMP 10 - 23rd July

I think I have a solution to texturing the ground, and that is to simply tile the textures - I hadn't really tried this before, but once I figured out how easy this was and how easy it made making objects of various sizes, I decided this was most likely the proper way to do most of these things. I looked at Paper Mario and tried doing something similar to the jungle texture in that game, as that is where this part of the game will take place!

The way I learned to make something tileable is to create the drawing in photoshop first, then use filter->offset, with half the height and width, and then smooth out the middle! Simple and easy, and works like a charm.

This is the tile I made with the pattern tool:









I deliberately made the texture very small - somehow I felt the calling of older games and the need to preserve space! Pasted on the ground tile from earlier it looks like this:


While an improvement from earlier, it clashes a bit with the colours of some of the other objects. The very texture itself also looked a bit 'camouflage-y', and by extension, a bit too serious for what I as trying to achieve. I had another look at the paper mario games, and learned that even in the Thousand Year Door, what passes for grass need not look like grass actually, so I tried another texture again, but this time I couldn't use the pattern tool due to the shape:










And posted on the model it looks like this:











I think this harmonizes a lot more with the playful look I am going for, so I'll be using this for now. One thing that doesn't look right is the side of the object, so I made a different texture for that, and in order to cover the edges with grass I made a simple 3D-object shaped liked paper shaped like grass, to hang over the edges - a bit of a hassle to do so, but it might look good.

Here is the result (from next day):













While this might work if the grass itself was a disembodied object with shadows and such, right now it just looks distracting. I am very happy with how the rock-part of the texture went though - also tileable.
Regarding the grass, I went back and had a look, and was struck by how I hadn't thought of it before:




















It seems the grass is simply a part of the side-part of the texture, so, trying my hand at that, this was the result:















Not only is this much, much easier because, as it tiles, I need not adjust anything afterwards, it also looks better.  I am happy with this - it reminds me of older Mario games, which is exactly what it should.