Commision - Snowy Field Ambush

I'm starting on a unpaid commission I decided to take in Dec and been having trouble getting round to it. Start working on general texture layout and testing new ides and concepts I'm at the stage displayed bellow and am trying to learn how to add snow to objects that may or may not have it already have any. Seeing as it's unpaid I won't invest too much time creating objects and am therefore using regenerated png's. So far I've tried using masking with a plasma cloud rendered in it on top of a texture painted on and it isn't working as effectively as I would like. Any hints on how to accomplish it would be welcome.

Well... what part are you having trouble with? I can see that the road is way to "clean" and needs some snow intermixed. I would put the road texture on the bottom layer and then add the snow on top setting a layer mask and painting out bits an pieces where the road is using a grunge brush. I think you are good on the colors as snow should generally be displayed as more of a blueish white rather than pure white in most cases and it looks like you have that here. You could probably signify some field "rows" with a bit of alternate dodge/burn on an overlay layer, though the dodge won't show up that much due to the underlying white of the base texture for the snow.

So i decided to hurry and get all the elements on the map down first then work on tweaking also let's Aegeri the chance to see it. What I meant jfrazierjr was the trees and the scarecrow adding snow to them. The client requested a clean road except for ice pools where I put the difficult terrain symbols. Other thing I'm not sure of is how to create an effective looking large snow drift. Aside from that it's comming along nicely enough. Gonna come back to this one of the course of the next couple days to tighten it all together.

Ah... ok on the road. For the trees, I would still do what I suggest and put the trees on a layer beneath the "snow" and use a grunge brush on the mask layer to let a bit of the snow texture bleed through... The snow drift should still be achievable via the same technique I mentioned above using the dodge/burn technique.

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Originally Posted by geamon

So i decided to hurry and get all the elements on the map down first then work on tweaking also let's Aegeri the chance to see it. What I meant jfrazierjr was the trees and the scarecrow adding snow to them. The client requested a clean road except for ice pools where I put the difficult terrain symbols. Other thing I'm not sure of is how to create an effective looking large snow drift. Aside from that it's comming along nicely enough. Gonna come back to this one of the course of the next couple days to tighten it all together.

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Rather than using plasma or something, it is better to use a variant of the image. Here I just used a thresholded inverted copy of the tree itself as a mask, to which I applied a bit of spread and 1/2 pixel blur. (The mask is on a white layer). I also applied a small bumpmap to give it edge, then added an overlay layer to dodge and burn tree shadows and highlights to match your overall l->r lighting.

-Rob A>

Thanks very much RobA, you're the man! That technique woks wonders as shown below.

So this is where I'm going to stop. The snow cover texture is a lot better now that it's more grainy. Added a fence I found on Dundjinni forums and added a test on the fields. Gonna wait for Aegeri to respond with what he is looking for in the map as far as the snow drifts and the field are concerned.

Looks good to me, man.

Looks great! I like those little drift lines you have in the snow texture.

Looks good. It still kind of erks me that the road texture has no snow on it, but hey it's still a nice looking work anyway.