Edge fade inner - issue with my own modified textures.
Ein0r
Traveler
Hi
I'm currently making a snow themed city map where I modified a few textures from the mike shley dungeon folder.
The effect that I wanted to generate looks like this: an edge fade inner with an opaque middle and a large area that gets a lot less opaque. I used 60-100-0 in this example.
But this effect doesn't happen for my map, with the textures that I edited.
The textures that I used were Mud_VH and Grass Green 4_VH. They can be found in the path: Profantasy\CC3Plus\Bitmaps\Tiles\Dungeon\Mike Schley
For one, the Terrain sheet or that texture seems to have a slight transparency effect. And when I use the same values for the edge fade inner effect as in the desired example above, the texture simply disappears.
These are the properties of the snow grass textures:
I've made two videos to demonstrate the problems.
The first one for the transparency effect: You can see the brown of the background shining through once I unhide the BACKGROUND sheet.
The second one for the edge fade effect on a test sheet, with the same values as in the example image above (60-100-0):
Comments
Try reducing that edge fade to a width of about 5 instead of 60 and see if you can see it then.
I have width 5 on the Terrain sheet and also in the first video. On the finished map it looks like this:
It doesnt look bad, and since I'm still inexperienced I'm quite happy. It's just not what I want. I want the trees to stand on the snow grass, without the background shining through. And the snow grass should get a lot less opaque towards the village and the street, because of people trampling over it all the time. It still gets lets opqaue towards the edge, but fairly abrupt. I've tried playing around with inner- and outer opacity, but it didn't bring the desired results. Not even with extreme percentages like 500%.
Increasing the width makes the texture "invisible" really fast.
This is how it looks like with width 10
And with width 20 it is nearly invisible:
I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to do, or where the problem lies, but if you are happy with the result, I hope all is well for now.
Nice map, by the way :)
Mh, I know I'm not good with describing my problem. 😅
I would be happy if I can remove that transparency effect from that snow grass. I don't want the background to shine through. But there is no transparency, blur or any sheet effect whatsoever on the Background sheet. And there's only the Edge Fade Inner effect on the Terrain sheet where the grass is on.
It's quite difficult to see which is background and which is this snowgrass you are talking about as I am unfamiliar with the appearance of either texture. Can you please show me a screen shot of the map with the sheet effects turned off to compare?
It might be partly due to the size of the snow grass polygons you're using, so the "edge" ends up occupying more of the polygon than you're happy with.
One option could be to increase the Outer Opacity to be greater than 0%. Try something small to start with, maybe 5% or 10%, and see if that looks better. Then increase it more, and see how that seems.
With many of the Sheet Effects in CC3+, it's often just a question of trying things out till you find something that works for you. That's what the "Apply" button's there for - so you can keep adjusting and trying without having to summon back to the dialogue box every time. But do remember to move the dialogue off to one side so you can SEE what's going on when you do that!
The map without effect.
Grass is on the Terrain Sheet. The darker snow dirt underneath the village is also on the Terrain sheet.
The snow dirt is on the background sheet.
The grey dirt is a road and is on the road sheet.
I've been doing trial and error for quite a while now, but none of the tries comes even close to what I wanted, because everything seems to heavily affect the whole texture. When I go width 1, inner 100, outer 0, then I get the desired opacity. But there is no edge fade. With an edge with of 1 and an outer of 50, I've the same effect as doing nothing. And going Width 5 and outer 50 makes it seethrough. Increasing the outer opacity only in small increments is hardly noticable. It's not that I wouldn't try.^^
Switching around Effect Units has a similar effect. I get a somewhat desired fade, but not the opacity.
Maybe it is an undesired side effect from editing the texture. I simply put it into gimp, magic wanded some areas and filled it with a white color. They are both pngs, and both have about the same size, with the original being 0,03mb bigger.
One of my collegues suggested that you might be experiencing something we call Transparency Acne (TA). That is when the rendering engine produces holes in a texure that aren't really there because there is a single pixel somewhere that is identical in colour to the underlying pixel. The rendering engine will then apply the edge fade inner to that pinhole and cause a perfectly circular spot of transparency just like around the real edge of that polygon.
It is really difficult to tell for sure because the new textures are quite highly patterned, so a few round holes are not immediately obvious.
Are you using the snow dirt texture for both the road and the background? If you are, then you almost certainly have TA.
Normally I would describe how to add a separation sheet, but since you are making new textures quite easily it might be easier and less time consuming in the long run to do what I do when I'm making new textures, and try to ensure that each texture is a slightlly different colour. Where there is white in a texture that white might have to be a bluish white, or a pinkish white, for example.
If you don't feel like going that way, a separation sheet is exactly what it's name suggests. You add a new sheet just underneath the road and copy the road onto it. Then hide all the other sheets and change the properties of the new road on the new sheet to a solid colour that isn't likely to be in the snow dirt texture. A good one for avoiding existing colours is 227 - a deep purple.
Then you need to copy the edge fade inner to the new sheet, and will probably have to increase the width of the edge so that it doesn't show at the edges of the road.
That sounds more than plausible, I think the white that I used for both the grass and the dirt are extremely similar. The road and the dirt are from different textures, but I deliberately chose fairly similar colors to make them look similar: minimally lighter or darker browns for example.
I will keep your suggestions in mind when I try and edit more textures for future maps to keep the colors a bit more differentiated. . I'll give the seperation sheet a try.
Thank you very much!
You're welcome Einor.
The helpful prod towards what is probably going to turn out to be the right answer came from Remy Monsen.