Riverbank/shores mod

[the_dudeWG]

Can the uniform, sandy beaches of all the water edges be modded to look more realistic? I can’t get over how fake they look, especially cutting through NML on the Arras map. The rivers look too green as well. I’m surprised I don’t see more complaints about this because they really look like a man-made water park ride to me. 

[Dutch2]

16 hours ago, the_dudeWG said:

Can the uniform, sandy beaches of all the water edges be modded to look more realistic? I can’t get over how fake they look, especially cutting through NML on the Arras map. The rivers look too green as well. I’m surprised I don’t see more complaints about this because they really look like a man-made water park ride to me. 

 

Personally  I wanna see 3D stuff first at that 2D no-mans land in the Arras map, like the 3D craters made by Genius, only not like now as an block for the mission editor, but permanently in the Arras map. 

 

[the_dudeWG]

I’m with you on that @Dutch2, but our displeasure with NML is well documented. I’m just surprised I haven’t heard more talk about these water textures. They’re plain awful. 

[the_dudeWG]

Here's some examples of what I'm talking about:

 

No man's land in Flying Circus

 

Lille in Flying Circus

 

Rise of Flight (standard graphics settings)

 

Rise of Flight (with texture mod from @AnKor I believe)

 

Clearly, Rise of Flight rivers looked way more realistic, even without mods. The Arras map shouldn't have been produced with rivers that look like this, but I am sure it will never be addressed officially. I would love to see the sandy beaches modded out of all the rivers. 

[Oyster_KAI]

I’m willing to believe that the BON map won't have the problems like Rhineland or Arras maps again, but what I am sad about is... Once such problems appear, we don’t know when we can fix them.

[Dutch2]

On 7/14/2020 at 8:24 AM, Oyster_KAI said:

I’m willing to believe that the BON map won't have the problems like Rhineland or Arras maps again, but what I am sad about is... Once such problems appear, we don’t know when we can fix them.

 

 I’m afraid the BoN map will be the next Yugra media map project. 

Edited July 15, 2020 by Dutch2

[LizLemon]

river arras sp.7zip

[Atomic_Spaniel]

8 hours ago, LizLemon said:

river arras sp.7zip 1.06 kB · 6 downloads

 

Brilliant! Thank you, Liz!

[the_dudeWG]

[the_dudeWG]

@LizLemon It Looks great, I can't thank you enough! Now I just need to figure out a way to get this in the game with mods-off! S!

 

 

[No.23_Gaylion]

Rad! Good job!

[sammydee]

Forgive a possible stupid question but could this mod be used on any Il2 maps?

[the_dudeWG]

9 hours ago, sammydee said:

Forgive a possible stupid question but could this mod be used on any Il2 maps?

I'm not sure, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. Just substitute the "LANDSCAPE_Arras_sp" folder with the map folder you want to try it with. 

[sammydee]

Thank you the_dudeWG.

[LizLemon]

2048 vs 512 tile texture res

 

2048 vs 1024

 

[Canvas25]

What a difference, looks great!

[blue_max]

Oh wow that looks amazing, has this been published already somewhere or is it WIP?

[I.JG3_CDRSEABEE]

Please do for all maps. When the 3080ti comes out maybe can crank things up in VR!

[vonrickenbecker]

2 hours ago, CDRSEABEE said:

Please do for all maps. When the 3080ti comes out maybe can crank things up in VR!

YES!!!!!!

[Avimimus]

On 7/14/2020 at 4:46 PM, Dutch2 said:

 I’m afraid the BoN map will be the next Yugra media map project. 

 

They seem to have done a pretty precise job on the DCS Syria map. Any reason you are afraid?

[Dutch2]

12 minutes ago, Avimimus said:

 

They seem to have done a pretty precise job on the DCS Syria map. Any reason you are afraid?

 

I’m still not convinced Yugramedia can make something on a high quality level. 

[Avimimus]

1 hour ago, Dutch2 said:

I’m still not convinced Yugramedia can make something on a high quality level. 

 

That isn't a reason though.

[AEthelraedUnraed]

On 7/24/2020 at 11:49 PM, Dutch2 said:

 

I’m still not convinced Yugramedia can make something on a high quality level. 

I actually like the Arras map. Lots of small villages everywhere. 

[E69_julian57]

On 7/15/2020 at 1:51 AM, LizLemon said:

río arras sp.7zip 1,06 kB · 66 descargas

Thanks @LizLemon
This mod can be used with JSGME...
How would the order of folders be
Thank you.

Edited July 28, 2020 by E69_julian57

[DD_Arthur]

14 hours ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

I actually like the Arras map. Lots of small villages everywhere. 

Yeah, I like the Arras map for that too. It also runs really well in multiplayer. No mans land? Hmmm....it’s okay from altitude but I get why some object to that aspect.

[Oyster_KAI]

Arras map and Rheinland map use the same technology. Now, Arras has villages and low houses that Rheinland lacks, and Rheinland has sandbar/riverbank textures that Arras lacks. They should be combined with each other.

Edited July 28, 2020 by Oyster_KAI

[AEthelraedUnraed]

On 7/27/2020 at 4:46 PM, DD_Arthur said:

Yeah, I like the Arras map for that too. It also runs really well in multiplayer. No mans land? Hmmm....it’s okay from altitude but I get why some object to that aspect.

It's true the no-man's land looks a bit... meh from close by. However, I don't think 3d crates are a solution as some have suggested. Besides the obvious time needed to create all 3d meshes, it would need a rather high resolution to actually look convincing which in turn would kill your framerate.

 

Rather, I think the solution would be a slightly more complex shader for the no-man's land, which has the potential to drastically improve the visuals at no cost in poly count. I did a small test in Blender with two different shaders, using just one of the existing textures and its alpha map. Left is just the colourmap with displacement, specularity and roughness set to static values, which I suspect is more or less what they have in-game. On the right is the same colourmap with the alpha map for displacement and roughness, and the inverse alpha map for specularity. As can be seen, this leads to an immediate perceived 3d effect, at relatively little cost.

[DD_Arthur]

That is interesting! 

 

There's something of the beach at low tide about it but it's got depth and a structure to it.....  

[Feathered_IV]

Looks nasty!  Definitely not a place you would want to come down in. 

[vonrickenbecker]

12 hours ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

On the right is the same colourmap with the alpha map for displacement and roughness, and the inverse alpha map for specularity. As can be seen, this leads to an immediate perceived 3d effect, at relatively little cost.

That looks fantastic!! This technique reminds me of the bump mapping mod for Rise of Flight, which made a huge improvement to the 3D look of the landscape. Not sure if this method is really similar or not (I'm not well versed in rendering tech), but it looks absolutely amazing. If you can turn this into a full mod you will have my undying gratitude!! 

[Chief_Mouser]

That's definitely an improvement. ?

However, for some reason the shell holes look squarish to my eyes, and it's a bit too shiny. A thousand times better than the default though - keep plugging away, would love to see this in-game.

Cheers.

[AEthelraedUnraed]

21 hours ago, vonrickenbecker said:

That looks fantastic!! This technique reminds me of the bump mapping mod for Rise of Flight, which made a huge improvement to the 3D look of the landscape. Not sure if this method is really similar or not (I'm not well versed in rendering tech), but it looks absolutely amazing. If you can turn this into a full mod you will have my undying gratitude!! 

Just to be clear, this is not in-game; it's just an example of what should be possible with relatively simple shaders and the current, already existing, assets. I don't think there's currently a way to modify the in-game shaders; any edits of this sort would need to be done by the Devs. And there's likely tons of issues why this doesn't work, such as the fact that you'd need two different shaders for your terrain (or accept an efficiency=performance loss for the standard terrain shader). You could implement it as a decal, but it would still need a different shader than all other decals, so you'd need a way to specify a shader in the map data, which means a lot of extra programming which the Devs are probably not gonna do. ?

[LizLemon]

On 7/29/2020 at 4:04 PM, AEthelraedUnraed said:

It's true the no-man's land looks a bit... meh from close by. However, I don't think 3d crates are a solution as some have suggested. Besides the obvious time needed to create all 3d meshes, it would need a rather high resolution to actually look convincing which in turn would kill your framerate.

 

Rather, I think the solution would be a slightly more complex shader for the no-man's land, which has the potential to drastically improve the visuals at no cost in poly count. I did a small test in Blender with two different shaders, using just one of the existing textures and its alpha map. Left is just the colourmap with displacement, specularity and roughness set to static values, which I suspect is more or less what they have in-game. On the right is the same colourmap with the alpha map for displacement and roughness, and the inverse alpha map for specularity. As can be seen, this leads to an immediate perceived 3d effect, at relatively little cost.

 

The normal maps for the no-mans land is really weird. Its possible to make them look like the right side of this in-game. That texture on the right side doesnt have any shadows baked into it either, its just a slightly noisy brown texture with the paths on top. 

 

Specular though is done in a really strange way with landscape tiles (maybe for compatibility with older maps/not changing old assets???). It'd be great if they actually had a dedicated spec channel. IMHO minneart is probably a better lighting model for the terrain since it works great for vegetation at a distance but then the shiny puddles would be hard. So maybe ideally a spec/roughness channel and a minneart/phong/material channel... which would require two new channels per map tile, and at that point you might as well toss in a third for detail tex and a fourth for vegetation/grass.

 

EDIT: forgot a channel for precipitation too, but height could be used for that....

 

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is a simple mod that is a test of higher resolution textures actually loading. This is for arras and in game you should see a solid grey tile that has 2048 written on it - and it should look pixel sharp. Just do a quick mission on that map and go into free cam (f11) to find it.

 

 

 

tile tex test.zip

Edited August 1, 2020 by LizLemon

[AEthelraedUnraed]

2 hours ago, LizLemon said:

 

The normal maps for the no-mans land is really weird. Its possible to make them look like the right side of this in-game. That texture on the right side doesnt have any shadows baked into it either, its just a slightly noisy brown texture with the paths on top. 

 

Specular though is done in a really strange way with landscape tiles (maybe for compatibility with older maps/not changing old assets???). It'd be great if they actually had a dedicated spec channel. IMHO minneart is probably a better lighting model for the terrain since it works great for vegetation at a distance but then the shiny puddles would be hard. So maybe ideally a spec/roughness channel and a minneart/phong/material channel... which would require two new channels per map tile, and at that point you might as well toss in a third for detail tex and a fourth for vegetation/grass.

 

EDIT: forgot a channel for precipitation too, but height could be used for that....

I couldn't find any normal maps though - just the colour with an alpha channel that seems to be meant as some sort of height or spec map (it works well for both, as is clear from my render).

[LizLemon]

The landscape heighmap creates a normal map for shading at a distance. This is combined with the bump map from the alpha channel of the terrain tiles to create the landscape shading.

 

Spec is weird - its doing a dot product of all three channels of the diffuse with a "greyK" thats a float of 0.333... (lol?) and then some other stuff. Spec looks best with texture.tini settings along these lines; note may be different for the different terrain shaders...

 

SpecLandPower=10
SpecLandBright=0.2
SpecLandThreshold=0.1

[Off_Winters]

Hi All,

Thanks Lizlemon, a very nice river improvement.

As for the question can this be used in other maps, I set up a set of files to use the new river_deep.dds image and waterdesc.txt document that Lislemon supplied. 
I set it up to run with jsgme and then tested in single player on the various maps. It does work on all maps, and you can change values in the individual waterdesc.txt file in each landscape folder to get the desired effect for each map.

some screen shots show that the river edge in the autumn Stalingrad map have become a little crisper with reduced beach front, and in the Kuban winter map the cracks in the ice are more pronounced and the waters edge has a discernable edge to it showing where ice meets earth.

I have attached the files for others to try, just drop unzipped folder into MODS folder and use jsgme to install. if you only want it for certain maps then delete the landscape folders out of the set you don't what the mod to work with. So if you only want it for Arras map then delete the other folders out leaving only the arras landscape folder in place.

regards Rob.

PS excuse the mouse writing on the pics

Bo60_new_rivers.rar

Edited August 21, 2020 by Off_Winters