Just a little tutorial on creating better grass in RTW. This probably applies to M2TW as well but I've never modded that.
One of the ways that RTW was limited was the ability to have only one grass type per climate which tends to create less interesting battlefields. On closer inspection of descr_grass.txt, however, you can see that the capability for adding more than one grass type per climate was there all along but for some reason wasn't made use of.
After a bit of experimenting I found that by changing the coding in the descr_grass file you can make different ground types on the battlemap use different strips of your grass texture file. The all important part of the code here is in red, which specifies the vertical position of the top and bottom of the strip (the top of the texture file is 0 and the bottom is 1) that is used by the ground type (in green). You need to make sure you leave a small gap between strips otherwise you get the bottom of one strip visible in the top of another one.
Other settings that you can play around with are height and width, but these ones are fairly good starting points.
Code:
climate temperate_forest_open
{
texture data/textures/forest_open.tga
spacing 0.5
present_in_winter false
ground_type grass_short
{
avg_height 1.0
width 2.0
density 40
tex_v1 0.0
tex_v2 0.18
falloff 0.4
colour 0,0,0
correction 0.1
}
ground_type mud
{
avg_height 1.0
width 2.0
density 50
tex_v1 0.2
tex_v2 0.38
falloff 0.4
colour 0,0,0
correction 0.1
}
ground_type grass_long
{
avg_height 1.2
width 2.0
density 60
tex_v1 0.4
tex_v2 0.58
falloff 0.4
colour 0,0,0
correction 0.1
}
ground_type scrub_dense
{
avg_height 1.2
width 2.0
density 40
tex_v1 0.6
tex_v2 0.78
falloff 0.4
colour 0,0,0
correction 0.1
}
ground_type forest_dense
{
avg_height 0.7
width 2.0
density 50
tex_v1 0.8
tex_v2 0.98
falloff 0.4
colour 0,0,0
correction 0.1
}
}
As you can see, I've specified bluebells as the type of grass that appears in the forest_dense ground type (the strip between vertical position 0.8 and 0.98), so in the open forest climate in RS2, which I've created as a beech/birch forest, bluebells appear under the trees.
In this shot you can see a variety of different grass types - short grass and long grass in the middle with some forest type off to the right as you go in under the trees (just out of the picture).
Here you see the grass used for the scrub ground type:
In addition, here are another few pointers to getting better grass.
1) Keep the bottom part of your strip reasonably thinned out to avoid getting lines where grass meets ground.
2) I tend to rub out part of the bottom of each strip as well to reduce this effect further and to encourage blending of the grass with the environment
3) Grass looks better if the top is lighter than the bottom
4) It's good to have some variation in light/shade and colour between the different blades of grass - it just looks so much better.
5) Colours often have to be exaggerated in order to get a decent level of saturation on the battlemap as grass colour is affected by the "distant" colour of the ground type that is coded in the descr_geography.db file.
6) There are various sources of grass texture that I've used here - but largely through google images...one or two grass elements were created using freely available photoshop brushes within GIMP.