Ive been porting some RSII trees to M2TW lately and I noticed some problems with the sprite generation process for very tall and very small objects. On very tall stuff the diffuse maps get very contrasty and some sort of black outline is generated around leaf planes:
I dont have a screenshot of it but for very small stuff like shrubs the opposite applies, the diffuse (and also normal) maps will be way too bright and have only few contrast.
The optimal height for vegetation seems to be somewhere around 10-14meters in milkshape, here I combined the original diffuse maps with new diffuse maps I created from only the top part of the tree:In the upper row you can see the fixed variants which look a lot smoother than the bottom one which has the the black outlines..
Also ingame the change between sprite and model wont be as noticeable then:
I havent tried it yet but rescaling the whole tree, create new diffuse maps from that and use these then for the tall model will probably work, I dont think it'll get the normals right then though..
Also would it be possible to add an option to add multiple entries to the vege model list "at the same time", its kind of annoying having to open the .db file again and again all the time and the new files that are created every time just spam the whole folder which contains the original vege.db.
Another tedious thing are the diffuse and normal maps, how do you convert them? Right now I first have to convert one by one in gimp to .dds and then again one by one to .texture. Would be cool to have an option to select multiple .dds/.texture files for conversion at the same time in the IWTE.
if that doesn't help and/or you'd rather have clumps of dense forest but more gaps between, then you can play with the G-Hardness tab settings
(dense forest ground type on the campaign map, doesn't necessarily give you forest_dense type all over the battle map, there's a translation through the other tables in the .db and a standard deviation thingy that gets applied) - let me know if you want more info on those bits.
Is the descr_geography explained anywhere already? Apart from the vegetation distribution tab I dont really get what is going on in this file.. How do I change the ground types on the battlemap (ie dense_forest) to appear more or less and also how to have them appear in few bigger or many smaller parts? And how are the battlemap ground types connected to the strat map ground types, I noticed climates "changing" their look completely by for example having nomore forests but only shrubs instead in "fertile low" areas. Can the battlemap ground type distribution be changed for each campaign map ground type? Or are the changes that come with these hardcoded? :/