I think the main issue I had was the shading on the edges of the texture. Maybe "bark-like" wasn't the right word, but it sort of accentuates the vertical pole-like look of the block. Our log blocks also have this shading, and it's fine there because tree trunks are usually more pole-like, but it looks weird in stalactites which are naturally tapered. The unshaded terrainset blocks look better as stalactites for this reason IMO.
Right, either of these options comes with a small decrease in realism, but I think it's in the spirit of the compromise that we talked about in Disc. Aesthetically I thought the reach & westerlands terrainsets looked very nice as stalactites when I tried it after adding the wall/fence blocks, and the coarseness is pretty difficult to notice unless one is being incredibly picky. I will say that I'm also unsure about adding a stalactite web block; something about mixing and matching the "full bodied" blocks with the cross-hatch web textures in cave systems just looks odd to me.
Promise me to test all blocks thoroughly. I have no hard feelings either way: if we just scrap all variants of the stalactite block, if we only keep one of them, or if you want me to fix the cylindrical look I gave it.
Have you made any tests specifically using the primary terrainsets and the slightly-different alts in the same rock face? IIRC the main textures and the alts you made were pretty similar color-wise, so I'm just wondering how useful those alts are compared to something with a little more variation in hues, as well as possibly an additional rock type, as we discussed in Disc earlier.
Yeah, the white-gray cliff at /warp overlaytest uses the reach alt set sparsely for accent (
2nd pic here). Also, there is an entire wall that shows #simplex combinations of alt and main straight on
(seen to the right side in this pic). They are close enough color-wise to enable striation, but different enough to be distinct. We still have options to add more, of course, but if this solves all issues we've had with terrainsets previously (not blending well, looking odd against the construction blocks), well then I think we shouldn't force more additions. Again, test it, tell me if you think some transitions are especially awkward and would benefit from an additional step, and we can discuss how that additional step could look like.
Is it realistic for bands of ore to be exposed on the outer faces of rock like that, or would the ore here be representing some other stone type? If the latter, do you think it would make sense to instead add another stone type filling in the "gap" in hues/textures that the ores are being used to fill in, to avoid tying our hands wrt. the textures of the ores like that?
I am not an expert but I'd say, it depends!
For iron and coal at least I've seen exposed bands. For coal and iron I posted real life examples of that as
images 2 and 10 here. Cassiterite (Tin ore) rather seems to be formed inside of quartz veins so it is not very likely to be exposed unless it has been mined previously (
some glamour shots of abandoned cassiterite mines). Electrum and Galena may look different from how I depicted them when exposed to weathering and in larger quantities, my reference images are only small fragments. Malachite could be exposed if I interpret
these images correctly, but then again, the rock here could have been cracked open. In one image it looks like Malachite could be more of a geode type mineral..No idea /shrug
I made the ores to represent coal, hematite, cassiterite, galena, electrum, and malachite, the principal sources for coal, iron, tin, silver, gold, and copper, respectively. I'm not saying we SHOULD use them to fill the gaps, instead, we COULD use them to make a rock face interesting. As an accent block with imbued meaning if you will. For instance, the iron islands could be textured using mostly the main iron islands set, as alt, meaningless accents it could use the north, eastern island and stormlands main set, and as an additional, meaningful, canon-backed accent it could use the hematite/ iron ore block.
