GR#072 - Minecraft Texturepack

[Dusty]

Since most of the work is near-finished I thought I'd post it here to get some critique before it's eventually finished. Besides finishing most of the work off I've also revisited a lot of my old work to "improve" it. Big improvements that I'm happy with is the new grass and cobblestone. I like the tree trunk I made but sadly it doesn't quite work out that well in the actual game.




Skins for mobs:

[Conzeit]

I just started playing minecraft, and I too have considered making a texturepack.

I agree about the general sentiment of it being inaproppiate to represent everything as a phisical reality, this does not fit the utterly abstract blockyness and all of the extremely gamy game mechanics of the game. You should seek an aesthetic which fits with the mininng-crafting but still does not see it as a pure phisical reality, makes it a little more abstract. Notice I'm not saying avoid putting logic behind this blocky world, just show plainly that it's not a purely phisical reality.

Now I must take issue with the rock texture you used, because upon trying all of the creative textures packs out there(that are 16x16, the texture patcher keeps crashing on me) including yours, I always feel like I'm missing something when I go into caves, it always always feels flatter and lighter. I want to feel lost inside a cave, and the textures just dont allow that, so in that sense even Notch's haphazardly scribbled texture trumps anything people have made trying to make it look pretty. Your ores also bug me, they dont seem to tile too well

[Mathias]

Great project, Dusty! Ambitious. Some VERY nice tiles in there.

I'm in agreement with the argument stating the overall style of your work being somewhat flawed when seen in the game world. Conceit nails it pretty good. With something like this I use extremes to prove the point - so here, imagine hi-res photo-real textures used in-game. Obviously, there'd be an even worse fundamental clash going on, don't you think?

But that aside, I think your pack still looks nice. It's not that it doesn't work at all, it just kinda pushes the envelope a little. Surely, you have zero desire to revise the entire set or even create a second version, but if you were to crank up the cartoonish feel, simplifying things more, than I think it would all work better.

[Dusty]

Now I must take issue with the rock texture you used, because upon trying all of the creative textures packs out there(that are 16x16, the texture patcher keeps crashing on me) including yours, I always feel like I'm missing something when I go into caves, it always always feels flatter and lighter. I want to feel lost inside a cave, and the textures just dont allow that, so in that sense even Notch's haphazardly scribbled texture trumps anything people have made trying to make it look pretty. Your ores also bug me, they dont seem to tile too well

Hmm, I'm not following you here. You say caves feel flat but my texture is anything but that. I actually get a lot of criticism about it NOT being flat. I dunno, I like the lumpy rock for natural rock as personally it makes me feel like the stone is naturally formed instead of something completely flat. However as I've made revisions to my pack eventually I will probably remake new natural rock since it doesn't sit very well with a lot of people. What will happen is I will allow users to customize their pack with various alternate textures.
As for the ores, I didn't put too much effort into the actual ores tiling because they're not something that's really going to be tiled much since they appear in small clumps.


And yes, I'm aware the texture pack isn't exactly the best artistic decision for Minecraft's blocks, but that's not something I'm willing to change. It's not that I'm being lazy but that I had a certain direction when I first imagined this pack and cartoony or simple wasn't one of them, though my pack has been considered one of the more "cartoony" packs out there compared to the majority of packs.

[sculptedpixel]

>Now I must take issue with the rock texture you used,

I don't feel that every minecraft texturepack needs to be impressionistic vs realistic - I think there's certainly room for all types, and tho I do lean more towards impressionistic packs, I love a lot of the character that Dusty has with this. 

[StaticSails]

Regardless of how these look wrapped around 3D cubes I think the 2D product is very beautiful and has great use of color. The inventory icons are great so far. I've honestly been visiting this thread to see what you're going to do for the armor.

I grabbed your monster skins and think they look pretty good in the game, shame the character's skin can't match these.

Anything that is supposed to be flat like wood, bricks or stone looks pretty good. Everything else sort of makes the lack of REAL texture a bit obvious.

I'd really like to see that armor worked on a bit more.

[Helm]

Sorry for slight derail, but after seeing this stuff

http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?p=2475378#p2475378

I think your tileset feels well within the aesthetic of minecraft, Dusty. My boundaries... they have expanded.

[Dusty]

Sorry for slight derail, but after seeing this stuff

http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?p=2475378#p2475378

I think your tileset feels well within the aesthetic of minecraft, Dusty. My boundaries... they have expanded.

Heh, ya. Photorealism packs are sadly a huge hit on Minecraft. The packs that consist of a bunch of textures pulled from google.images tend to get much more recognition than the truly amazing ones like Eld's:
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1021&t=37621
or Shiny's(sadly abandoned): http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=68333

The only packs that come close to touching the popularity of photorealism packs are the mix packs where people pick and choose different images from different packs and make a compilation. They tend to look pretty bad because of the mixed styles, but people love them

[Conzeit]

hrm I can see how people think your texture isnt flat. Your texture has lines connecting rocks everywhere, and indeed the shading implies the rock isnt really flat...but when you see it in-game, you follow all the lines as they connect to eachother and you quickly realize it's just a texture, I think the attempt to define the geometry so finely puts in evidence the inevitable flatness of the texture.

I think the ideal situation to test a rock texture is to start exploring an unknown, dark cave and test wether you see any better with the new rock texture, if you do the texture fails. This is the reason I really havent installed any pack it; it takes away from the excitement of exploring the unknown when I can see the rocks more far ahead than with the default texture, also the ores usually pop up just a bit too much.

I think the main thing is this texture sets the ambience for most of the exploration of the game, so you gotta look at it as a way to set ambience, not as a texture that must have the most accurate geometry or the prettiest looking colors.

[Mathias]

So Conceit is saying that the rock cave texture is almost pretentious, in that it's confined to display in a low-poly, low-res world, yet tries to be much more, exposing itself, belying the very false impression of bump mapping it tried to convey all along. Oceanic.