Environment Art Technique Question

Noth

I'm hoping someone can tell me how the grass edge is done. It looks like there's an alpha on it, but I'm wondering how the tiling texture on the rest of the grass works with it. Thanks!

Noth

@poopipe @EarthQuake Either of you fellas have any ideas?

poopipe

 an alpha clipped strip with the edging on it blended with a top down projection of the grass texture is probably the simplest/cheapest method

Axi5

It's exactly as poopipe says. The frequency change gives the effect away but it's well done.



Forgive the crappy paint over, I couldn't be bothered to open Photoshop and this was a bad time to learn that Affinity Designer doesn't like my tablet...

Anyway that white portion in the lower right is part of the tiling texture (not the whole lot). It could literally just be an extruded edge & separate material shader. I also imagine that the shadow has a slightly faded opacity in order to map onto any transition surface below it. Lighting is of course baked too.

Noth

Hey, thanks guys. Ah okay, I was wondering if it was a soft alpha to help blend into the other tiling geo. It just floats above the other portion a bit? The geo would look something like this? With the alpha fade blending into the texture below, but hiding the hard edge cutoff of the geo below?

Axi5

Most probably that's the case. It could also just be that depth test in rendering is disabled which is a common trick in 2D games & things are just rendered in order like layers in Photoshop.

In fact on the right most part of your first picture there seems to be a seam giving away another clue, not only is a strip being used but decals too. Not fancy deffered decals that project all that shadery goodness onto the lower mesh, just plain simple stickers.