Best flight movie ever made ! And at the end during the music/dogfight sequence your see the real english channel colour when a heink crashes into it. ( the rest of the water sequences were filmed as was the rest of the movie in and over spain)

ohh yeah ! that kinda came out the blue. wonder if anything here has made em think. this thread has been quite objective in its study more so than a home user mod thread. lets wait and see, but ive a feeling i know what this will be like !. and we'll if we dont need this mod after all. That would suit me fine. Excellent.

first one with a new screeny at 12:00 pm over kent gets a cookie. lol

You can keep changing the colours as much as you like , it will never look like england untill the field borders are replaced with hedgerows .

I agree. It's not the colour of the fields that are so much the issue, but the trees and hedges. Trees need to be darker

new patch new lighting, dusk time has a fantastic new flavour, and theres just much more light about in general, more specular effects etc.

at dusk though the green comes through really weird, really !, check it out, quick mission set time to 20:00. darkening the default textures is a must now. oo eck.

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/55...37F71F372D041/

Somehow, I feel its not the saturation (from some earlier posts, is that what you're tweaking?) which needs adjusting... it is the actually hues themselves which need going over

This is much better, I hope this was done ingame and not photoediting etc?

that is an un edited screenshot.

Ali, do you prefer the new lighting then? How is midday?

I think the old lighting looks better for Dusk and Dawn, but midday looks better with new lighting.

actually i really do like it. actually ive not seen anything better tbh. utterly outstanding lighting effects ! but ive a confession. lol and its a bad one too.

nvidia colour settings were ticked in my Gcard nvidia settings. so i unticked them, it became apparent im not even set up properly. anyway basicly for a graphics guy like myself. im the biggest fool around here today.

it doesnt affect what you guys see but only my take on it all through what ive been viewing incorrectly.

but. the new reworked lighting has a nice colour balance, so during the day im seeing such awesome blue skies, really deep colours, this alongside the scenery makes alot of sense. everything in general is that bit brighter. the other side of the coin is dusk time and well i love the effects there even better. apart from the phospherus colour the greens go! but the colour bleed that goes on everywhere else is just brilliant.

those trees and greens for the carpet beneath the trees and some of the light greens need to become darker still,

this latest patch isnt very good for my system so i might not work to much on it further. <whispers> "its a bit of a step backwards imo"

Edit: after uninstalling the game cleaning everything out etc, re installing. WOW its better, not perfect. but better.

Yeah I'm suffering with the latest patch too, i did a full reinstall of steam and Cod myself first, but i get loads of crashing and stuff now :(

The 'old' feel. and my Artistic Impression... About as close to somthing i personally dont mind, and it covers all bases. all times of day.

whilst avoidin the cosmic greens that simply have to much yellow. ohh and the heavily darkened tree carpet patches i think are perfectl. it looks washed out hence the 'old'. i cant do anymore tbh.

i think the original artist with his full templates should go back and rebalance the yellow which gives the greens its phospherescent nature and whilst retaining the yellow over the lighter coloured non green fields.

timeline in screenshots.
12:00 / 15:00
19:30 / 19:30
00:00 / 02:00

http://i.imgur.com/W7lsxl.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/1ssHGl.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/quM6ql.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/F6h55l.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Oq6IQl.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/wpWESl.jpg

That certainly looks effective; like WoP without the dreaded filter.

I trust this is just for fun though mate....:-P

Nice work on the trees though; so you finally managed to sort the colour out?
Out of interest as well, some of the green colours don't look too bad there. Maybe if more of the standard grass colours were added to the lighter-colour fields, and then brownish/gold fields added it would look perfect....:cool:

I like it, especially the trees, but that the yellow on those photos is way too white at 12:00, could either be snow or cotton to my eyes.

there was not any trees in last images. just the darker carpet for the trees (forrests) to sit on.

but finally figured out the problem with the trees file. so here we have stupidly dark trees lol.... DOH ! anyway few more files still need changed to allow for the darker trees still. but its a big difference.

same ground textures as above. but the trees themselves change all that.

http://i.imgur.com/9dKFal.jpg

Attempts to get something from the existing textures is a waste of time. Playing with the light will not give anything. Textures must be completely reworked.

Taken from here:
http://www.sukhoi.ru/forum/showthrea...=1#post1625647

yeah thats great. but that dude has got a whole load of more problems on his hands now. no roads, misplaced trees etc etc the list goes on. i could easily replace these tilable textures for english fields just like that but that most certainly isnt the way unless you create everything from scratch. and without the sdk is doubt thats too possible. but when it is ill be all over that with my modellor buddies.

i will probally release a darker trees only mod for now.

This is possible without the SDK. We need to take the original texture and replace all the small fields step by step. Yeah it's time consuming, but this is possible.

yehp ! its a major PITA imo. but somthing i might try. besides the alpha channel is a good basis to work on for layout.

Looks good Ali. I'm keeping a keen eye on your progress...:)

Very nice work, Ali!
Whilst the work that guy on the Russian forum has done looks nice, are the colours really representative of summer? It looks more like Spring to me.
It shows, though, how 3'D hederows really are needed to give the game that realistic boost.
Rather than creating new tiles, couldn't that guy have just recoloured the existing ones?

EDIT-looking at all the pictures on the Russian forum, I think the default colours are much better.

I take it David Hayward hasnt spotted this thread yet?

lol.

ok default textures, with a seperate mod for all tree related textures. the darker tree mod. which i think is quite tidy, BANG TIDY !

what a difference.
click and click again for fullscreen
http://i.imgur.com/9I33nl.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/O4uzll.jpg

That does look much better!
Can the trees be moved/arranged, Ali?
Also, here's an interesting photo....
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/7539/englandal.jpg

not to familar with speed tree and how its being implented in cod. so no not without the sdk.

WOW, this was only by changing trees?? I hope luthier is watching your work, because you are doing it for them! I almost feel as if last patch's lighting upgrades were a direct response to your experimenting :)

Great job!

Apologies for all the pictures, but I'm posting them here in the hope they are useful in providing a reference for work to mod CloD's landscape. As you can see, Ali's work on darkening the trees makes CloD's landscape much more realistic in a single move. Apologies if some are a bit blurry, but it's hard to fly the aircraft with one hand and take pictures with the other ;).

The images are all taken from my glider at heights of 2,000 - 5,000' over Wiltshire in the SW of England and not far from Salisbury (which is in the top left corner of CloD's map). Almost all are taken at times between 13:00 and 17:00. Most were taken in July and August. In August, some crop fields have been harvested, which explains the big, medium brown fields.

Obviously, the yellow of oil-seed rape would have been absent in the 1940s. Similarly, before the widespread use of agricultural pesticides the fields would have had more wild flowers and been less monochrome.

The landscape is quite typical of most of the South of England.

If people are annoyed by the bandwith taken up, let me know and I'll edit the post to remove them!

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/P1000111.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/DSC01802.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/DSC01800.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/P1000027.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/P1000033.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/P1000102.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/P1000099.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/P1000106.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/P1000119.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/P1000110.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...102_2902-1.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...DSC01520-1.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/DSC01569.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...DSC01661-1.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/DSC01681.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/DSC01684.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...DSC01760-1.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/DSC01766.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/DSC01802.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/DSC01817.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/DSC01803.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...6/P1000101.jpg

thanks for the appreciation guys. what the eye sees as a whole every colour combining together is whats leading us to our conclusions. having that dark realistic tree colour in there is definetly enough for the overall feel of the textures. i hope the developer artists agree somewhat.

nice pics rocket dog. if i get round to re doing the field tiling, ill be using those as reference minus the cosmic green that just doesnt work anywhere but photographically. and were no where near that stage with shaders yet.


well who can tell. but i ashamedly said somthing similar to a friend. but i did also mention the shaders for nightime some time ago too and then we got moon light. im an ok artist, competant with the tools for sure. and lookin at my history i do excell where balancing of special effects are concerned. but theres always a better artist round the corner and thankfully so.

Ideally, and you must agree, the dev team should reproduce your modifications, and save us all that extra modification all together? Even if it's "ripping off" your tweaking, they're implementing our common goal here of acheiving realistic ground appearance, don't you think? :)

Just thinking here. I'm not a photographer by any means, but I do own three cameras. This reminds me of when something bright dominates the scene, and the camera adjusts down the exposure and brightness to try and retrieve some balance/detail from the clouds, causing the background (terrain) colours to darken a lot. That's what it seems like to me anyways

yes phillip all these "lens" factors need to be taken into consideration.

the only game that i know of that simulates a lens view of the world is gran tourismo 5. and it does a bloody good job. we can not replicate lens effects in il2cod yet. hint hint. (this is 1 aspect thats part of the future of graphics)

the dev team should change the trees to a more darker variety. yes. i hope they will.

i would love to be part of there beta testers or feedback team with an russian and english speaking person. but i dont know if they organise like that.

lol for now i got me some cosmic green i must get rid off.

Yes, the camera is stepped down a few stops to maintain the detail in the highlights of the clouds. Of course it also looks like its a slide film, which generally has a lower dynamic range than computer monitors.

GT5 isn't the only game that simulates a camera lens, if you're talking about photo mode. And even then its not a simulation of the lens, but mostly post processing effect (Note: I'm assuming the DOF blur is using the z buffer) And games like crysis 2, UDK, ect are doing tons of things to mimic/fake the look of film. Anamorphic lens flair, color grading, color fringing, ect.

dusk around late evening. its a pleasure to fly over that now.
http://i.imgur.com/AIsc9l.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/OTZ71l.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ppWoNl.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/CEZrul.jpg

these shots look superb Ali Fish!

I think you have a pretty good eye for this job ;)

I'll stay tuned for an official update with the changes to the trees :D Just you watch!

Yes, regarding the picture I posted above, the colours are definitely far off from what the eye would see.
However, it demonstrates how, in a particular area, there are only really 2 main colours of fields, as opposed to the patchwork/multi-coloured design of CloD.
I think natural simplicity is key here.

The dark trees make a big differance.

Indeed.

A couple of days I did some thinking about the trees.

Yes, to me from a distance a forrest seems darker that what we have ingame. However, when I imagine a tree whose leaves do have the dark green that I imagine for a forest it just would not look right. I compared this recently to the trees I saw when taking my car over 500 km. And indeed the trees don't look dark at all when looking at them individually.

I then came to think that forest just seems to be so much darker than the surrounding meadows because of shadow. In fact the totality of leaves of a tree represent a much more fractal shape than meadows (that's the evolutionary benefit of leaves on a tree) and thus there's more fractal shadow on the inner layers of the tree crown. Hence why they appear darker from the distance while on close up they aren't.

agreed. ive commented about the differences in the mass of different colours at different distances. this is not implemented in cod (yet?) and the problem, 2 tree base models. 1 for close up and one or distant. distant colouring is based on close up model colouring and blended thus to make the transition relativly invisible. the close up version given presidence unfortunatly.

there is no shader that blends the distant with the close tree model textures. the lod of the hi quality version creeps in, in an awkward manner. the colour of the hi quality tree model when viewing up close had to be used on the distant model too. hence the problem. and why we have "cosmic green tree-itus". lol (im not suggesting we need a shader btw)

with my mod we now have hi quality tree model far to dark so it blends with the distant tree model. although its not that bad. as i will demonstrate in roughly 1 hours time with a video (uploading presently)

in the current format we have several tree variations, and soon i will dable in re colouring them whilst trying to keep the major tree groups as dark as possible. variation is what we want to see more than at present. but hang tight for the video. i know that now without controllable vehicles this is a flightsim. i think the trees should be based on the darker distant colours seen from height as thats where we are in a flightsim.

a day in the life of some IL2 graphics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUa_viVGNNs&hd=1

its worth having darker trees or is it not ?

It almost look a new scenery!.
Why not release it?.

Looks great with the darker trees, how about darkening the flourescent green landscape as well?

Huge improvement.

Can anything be done with France?

@ Ali Fish...

that's looking pretty good mate. I agree with Formula88 about earthing up the landscape colours though, but on the whole... its a fantastic improvement

Ali, that looks amazing! :o

Brilliant work! Whilst I can see what the others mean about earthing the terrain colours up, I don't think they need darkening. I think that a lot of the terrain tiles have colours which look quite acidic. Rather than working on the whole tile-set, maybe it's just these individual areas which need sorting out?

Either way, that really does look quite amazing. The trees darkness makes so much difference.

i could change the ground textures for the umpteenth time but i think its the shader that works the brightness that needs changed not the texture itself.

I agree with that, however from what I can see, some field textures clearly look a lot different to others. In any case, there are never as many differently coloured fields in real-life as there are in CloD, so whilst the shaders may need improving, the overall layout of this multi-coloured field spectrum does too :grin:

Top textures on the tress!
Good work buddy!
Keep it on!

ill look into it. Starting with.... this is how the tileable textures tile together. within this whats possible is astounding in theory!. regional field variations might work better and can be done here. theres going to have to be some mathematics here too to keep the tiled nature from revealing its true nature. the job is to break it up create randomisation. so percentages of light fields next to darker fields will need to be thought of. quite a job. but a job for a seperate scenery mod. a new island or theatre. if im going to put that level of work in. it'll be for somthing grand and not just a makeover... i think...

http://i.imgur.com/pAErHl.jpg

Wow, that's really interesting! Do each of the coloured regions apply to a way in which the textures fit together? Or, as you allude to, are they regions in themselves?
Interesting stuff!
I agree, I can see how cosmetic work like you have done on the trees may be nice to release as a short-term mod, but complete modding projects at this stage may be rather pointless, because we don't really have any idea on what the team are planning to do, or have already done.

Aside from the terrain, those top-cloud layers are in desperate need of work. They look like something produced in 2001! Benders cloud mod for Il-2 included some awesome textures for the high-cloud layers, which really improved the game. A simple enough fix to do (if CloD is using .tga files like Il-2 classic did) which can make a whole lot of difference.

for the bulk of the scenery is 4 textures. ive just painted each of them a full colour. they fit together in any order really but im gona check that .

wow! didnt notice before but each main fields tile is a clone of each other with same road networks but slightly different design to it. if i could dictate what tile sits where, ie have 4 red tiles in close proximation theoretically you could add some serious regional variations. like kilometres of a predominatly single field type. and not so random. but doing that wouldnt be too good the bigger the size of variation or collection of colour in 1 area is enough to make it start looking repeated which is what we want to avoid, the balance of what they have done is actually very good. suppose there is no harm in trying a few experiments with this with all your help & feedback. france is more appealing as a playground.

heres the 4 tiles ! they can all be interchanged . 1/8 scale
http://i.imgur.com/90vwc.jpg

if we had a few more tiles on offer one could make seriously elaborate scenery. im excited for the SDK.

Looking at them, for an area with that many fields, there are far too many differently coloured fields, and there are some really odd colours going on there as well. Either way, the method they have employed does have it's merits.
An issues that I can see, though, is the 3-D grass. If one changes the colour of the tile/field, does this then change the colour of the associated grass/crop?
It certainly does look very interesting though. Roll on the SDK!

as far as i can tell the grass is independant but i might be wrong, ive no doubt it could though. . incidentaly in arma2 that effect does occur ! and going from high altitude to ground level see's a blend of 3 sources in that respect.

This was the original tiles.

http://www.simhq.com/_air6/images/air_223a_002t.jpg

At the moment, the game really needs a blue atmospheric haze to make the LoD a lot smoother and realistic.

With that in mind, Ali, have you seen this before?
http://www.windwardmark.net/products...sub=technology

(also, check out their nimble cloud-generator. It certainly looks good to my eyes. It's hard to tell if the effect is over the top or not, but I'd imagine it's adjustable)

EDIT-apart from the blue fields, the old tiles look much more realistic; clear areas of foliage and trees, and apparent borders to the fields as well.

indeed it is. awesome!. and wow this explains alot of things. like why the trees were made the colour they were. where did u get that image from then ? its tilable so that must be from the devs?

This tile has been posted several years ago from Oleg himself, to show us the way to work of these "symmetrical" tiles.

Somebody here could have a better one version of this file.

that would be great if sombody did. anyway lots of info to go on with. :)

I half suspect that we'll never actually get an SDK given 1C's reduced manpower on CloD. The devs have so many other things to work on that it's unlikely they'll want to allocate manpower to building one. I guess it's years away if it ever appears.

The contrast between this and what we ended up with is pretty striking. This, to me, looks much better. It has hedges and believable greens. If you compare it to my Wiltshire photos the similarity is obvious. I wonder why they rejected this approach and went for the odd "crayon like" colours and layout of the final textures?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...g/DSC01817.jpg

I think that they dropped this scheme to try and create a more 'tailored' terrain, whereby textures used were built from scratch do that they worked at all levels of altitude (with terrain textures based on photos/satellite images, you can get that horrible 2-D effect down low.) Having said that, it's only really the images of the trees which give this 2-D impression, and if the dark outlines of the trees were covered by trees or other foliage, I'd imagine it would work just like the current 'carpet' in CloD.

Also, I think as earlier Dev updates showed, the photo-type of textures just looked wrong without correct shaders or bumping.

darkening edges around roads and fields. it works in a way lol, the train line without sort of shows the difference.

http://i.imgur.com/jm2rVl.jpg

I really appreciate your recent work but may I say that I feel the dark outlines of the roads to be too much? To me at least they now appear as having been drawn with a pencil.

About the hedges: this is something I miss a bit over England as it is very typical for this country side.

My suspicion is that they created tiles that they could use for France too.

yeh there too wide presently. it was a quick test.

All in all, good work.

But why not making totally new, seamless, tileable set of textures, and their normal maps? Google Earth have very fine images of the corresponding terrain, which with some photoshop skills could be easily converted into textures.

In that way you can avoid stupid IL2 (used in enhanced il2 called “CoD”) texture placement, and make textures more blending one with another.

IF it's true that Il2 CoD uses a single tileable texture to cover the terrain, we should request to be transformed into engine from that to use a series of textures (and have them all be the same texture as a start), so that we can modify them and make them different.

Every artist will always tell you that painting a small border around the ourside border always makes the image pop and stand out more. Darker trees will do that.

I personally think that the darker borders look a lot better! :cool:

Looks excellent Ali-Fish the colour contrasts and so on look stunning. GJ S!

I really like it :) Can´t wait to test your mod m8

Look here: http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g260/restranger

http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g2...er/bobtile.jpg

http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g2...er/Fieldsb.jpg

http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g2...nger/Townb.jpg

WOW. Great pics. I want that in CloD.

Rather than incorporating photo-shop edited satellite textures, I'd rather see those colours in CloD (except for the turquoise field which looks odd)
I think it's possible, and if done this way, you wouldn't get that horrible 2-D effect when flying at low altitude.

Those are early stage CloD tiles. In the first picture you can see that it is actually made up from 4 identical tiles

Yeah, I remember them from the early updates. I also remember flying over them in Il-2 (modded) :-P For some reason though, the weird turqouise field always let it down. But the greens and browns look spot on. Replace the turqouise field with a wheat-coloured one, and it would look perfect (save for the repetitive pattern which you mentioned T-Bag. Were there more of these tiles? I can't remember now. I think the team scrapped this to try and go another route which had less of a repetitive aspect).

Looking good Ali...

need to get the "forest" a bit more mottled though and the fields a bit more earthy, but best and most noticeable... it can be seen that the plane camouflage is actually starting to work

it.d be great to use those images as base. but so much work removing trees. by the end you end up with not so dissimmilar to default textures if you take the shaders into account. but im still thinking about it. a way to darken all field edges realisticly and a prominant enough change to warrant a mod.

the trees are realisticly coloured in cod according to those image. maybe its the ground that does need changed as opposed to the trees. does that possible change work in with the current shader setup over 24hour cycle. lots of considerations. it'll never be realistic. always more artistic.

on the subject of allowed mods etc etc. these changes affect mutliplayer maps too on a visual basis. and using kegetys methods. so what does that mean. asides my own enjoyable adventures with it. its more impractical to create this mod at this time realisticly speaking.

Somehow that doesnt look right

I think the turquoise field might be cabbage

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HXx0e6I2Kk...5_Kohlfeld.jpg

http://topnews.in/law/files/cabbage-field.jpg

Look excellent Ali, but a bit too dark now imho, especially trees. 1C's are too clear, yours are a bit too dark. What about "bottle green" http://www.minedirect.com/EnlargedPa...ldavite-5.html ?

if they were test tiles how come we ended up with what we have now, really strange, seems like a step backwards almost

?? Why?
(I´m not a native English speaker...)

The darkening edges around roads and fields,
looks like someone has gone round the feilds with with a black pen
is there one without the edges darkend, so i can compair

are the devs nuts to abandon this type of landscape!?
this actually looks soo much better than what we have now.
instead they decide to give us a landscape which looks painted by a hippy who took shrooms.

hahaha yeah so true. maybe there was a problem with rendering those tiles, maybe someone could try them out ali ;)

cant use these tiles without re doing all the normal maps and alpha channels. the tiles have to work within the current shader system. not so easy as just putting them ingame im afraid.

Some Canon´s 1940_1941_Channel CAN pics at noon.

Although not so detailed at low level as CloD, has the overall feeling of the english countryside color and atmosphere.


http://img864.imageshack.us/img864/6637/grab0008p.jpg

http://img864.imageshack.us/img864/6963/grab0009.jpg

http://img861.imageshack.us/img861/3125/grab0012.jpg

Oops! Same post.

Mad G,

Canon's map is much more like the real world that CloD's dismal effort. Compare it to the photographs taken over Wiltshire I posted earlier in this thread and you can see the similarity immediately. Canon has represented the terrain as it appears at about this time of year, before crops have been harvested and left brown stubble or earth fields.

I am at a loss to understand how CloD has ended up with less realistic terrain than IL-2 1946. They must have made a fundamentally bad design decision a couple of years ago and ended up stuck with what we have now. From what Ali says, it may be that the lighting they have used just can't do morning/evening as well as noon. It's one of those "what were they thinking?" moments.

Actually, I disagree. Canon's map looks more like spring; the field textures are extremely saturated and green/yellow, which may show grass after it's been in the sun, but the lack of burnished crop fields (or any crop fields) represents the landscape one might see more in the spring.
Whilst I agree that it may look more like England, we have to realise that the texture transition is completely different; repretitive tiles are just horrible.
In some respects, the job the 352nd team did was better, but I just had a look at their textures, and they're really dark.

LOL haha
I thought you meant that it was what I was saying on my post that didn´t "look" right... Please, excuse my stupidity :)

Ali- great thread! :) Nice to see someone tackling the CloD terrain. I think there's potential to go pretty far with this but I imagine it will take some effort. My hunch is the terrain maps probably need to be redone from scratch with proper photographic elements and careful colour balancing in order to really sell the look of a photorealistic terrain. Anyway I'll be following this thread with keen interest. Inspiring stuff!

Cheers,
Ekar

what .dds importer are you using? I tried the nvidia one last night in CS5 and had nothing but problems. When i tried to save i got a disk error with it.

cs5 & nvidia photoshop plugins for me both 64 and 32bit.

Me flying and you can see some greens ! ;) and haze layer

http://i426.photobucket.com/albums/p...R/DSC_0039.jpg

http://i426.photobucket.com/albums/p...R/DSC_0236.jpg

That's not England or like England.

The members location is a bit of a give away lol.

now you're talkin' :-P