[C+C] I could really use some help making my grass and wood plank tiles better!

[Mrwhitepantz]

Hey there, I was hoping some of you could help me with a couple of my tiles.



For my grass, I attempted to follow Kiwinuptuo's texture tutorial, and I think I did a fairly decent job with it. My problems are 1) the grid is still kinda there, and 2) it doesn't feel like very realistic grass to me. As far as the grid goes, I think it's because I have two larger clumps almost horizontal with each other, and then smaller blades of grass below them. I'm not sure what exactly it needs to feel more realistic to me, but maybe it's the fact that my blades are more like leaves, which makes it seem like a caricature of grass, rather than real grass.



These are my wooden planks. I think that they look pretty good from a distance, although someone has said they look a bit more like bricks than planks. Up close is where they start to fall apart, I feel. It could just be too much noise, I didn't use any noise generators, but there are a lot of colors in there. I tried to give it some structure, primarily horizontally to give it a wood-grain feel, but I'm not sure how well I actually succeeded there. Again, I looked at Kiwinuptuo's texture tutorial for inspiration, but the planks there have the same sort of not-quite-realistic quality that bugged me about the grass.

Any help you guys can give me would be extremely appreciated!

[camanho.pt]

having similar problems with the same tuto and because of it I can't help with the color issues.
My sugestion is for the wood texture.. I think you could turn the planks longer tha this

[Mrwhitepantz]

My sugestion is for the wood texture.. I think you could turn the planks longer tha this

Thank you. Unfortunately, and maybe I should have mentioned this, my tiles are only 32x32; so the planks are about as long as they can get. Perhaps if I made them thinner they would appear longer?

[Mrwhitepantz]

Hey, just wanted to share an update, and get more thoughts if there are any out there. After some feedback, I decided to drop what was a very stylized look for grass, and instead try and make a rougher texture with thinner blades that don't stand out quite as much. Again, comments and criticisms are welcome.



Thanks for looking!

[Tidbit]

Hey, just wanted to share an update, and get more thoughts if there are any out there. After some feedback, I decided to drop what was a very stylized look for grass, and instead try and make a rougher texture with thinner blades that don't stand out quite as much. Again, comments and criticisms are welcome.



Thanks for looking!

I like the new colors you have but I don't like this new grass have it looks a bit more like green noise than grass. Have you tried applying these new colors to your old grass image?

[Mrwhitepantz]

I like the new colors you have but I don't like this new grass have it looks a bit more like green noise than grass. Have you tried applying these new colors to your old grass image?

You know, that was a good suggestion. Here I did just a simple color replace with, my first one only had 4 colors so I left out the darkest for now, but I think it looks pretty good, and with a bit more attention could actually look really good.



Thank you very much.

[Johasu]

The texture of your grass will feel differently depending on what you place on top of it.
The first version you had was large textured implying a much closer view of the grass blades.  This works more on games with large close up sprites.

The more "noisy" grass tile would look much better with sprites that are much smaller scale, as if from very far away.

Also, you will find that a lot of the definition in a grass tile comes not from the actual texture and color but the separation of the grass with other terrains as well. Are you going to use simple square tiles to link the grass with soils, roads, water, and so on?
Or are you going to create more defined borders and transitional edges?

I am far from an expert on these things.  I was just putting forward the ideas because you haven't really clearly expressed your purposes and your end goal does have something to do with the style you should aim for with your terrains.

~Things to think about~

[Mrwhitepantz]

The texture of your grass will feel differently depending on what you place on top of it.
The first version you had was large textured implying a much closer view of the grass blades.  This works more on games with large close up sprites.

The more "noisy" grass tile would look much better with sprites that are much smaller scale, as if from very far away.

Also, you will find that a lot of the definition in a grass tile comes not from the actual texture and color but the separation of the grass with other terrains as well. Are you going to use simple square tiles to link the grass with soils, roads, water, and so on?
Or are you going to create more defined borders and transitional edges?

I am far from an expert on these things.  I was just putting forward the ideas because you haven't really clearly expressed your purposes and your end goal does have something to do with the style you should aim for with your terrains.

~Things to think about~

Thank you for the advice. This is just going to be used in a texture pack for minecraft, so basically it will just be squares separating things, no real edge tiles. It is definitely a point to consider in the future however, and I wouldn't have made the link between the distance/type of game and the texture myself, so thank you for that.

[Mrwhitepantz]

Alright, one more update on the grass here, I've added some of my darkest shade now, created a bit more depth I feel like. I'm pretty happy with where it is I think, but I'm always open to more ideas or help or criticisms.

[Selassin]

 Although I'm newbie myself, I think your last tile look good, except I think you can reduce brightness in some areas(so the distance between the ground and grass will be more). I think Secret of Mana 3 is really good example, if you want to go for better grass tile you can look at it's tiles.
  (Image from this tutorial page)