i’ve been banging my head against my desk all morning on this. ok, as i’ve said before, i’ve been working on a map based around a farm with quickly constructed field fortifications. i’m not part of any mapping team or whatever, i’m doing everything myself. i’ve created an metric asspile of textures, and to toot my own horn for a second, most of them look pretty damn good. i’ve run into a brick wall on what i’d thought would likely be the easiest texture to make- a bail of hay. :disgust: i’ve tried painting one from scratch, and it just looks retarded. i’ve even done some searches using the google image search engine, and the only pictures of hay bails i turn up are either the round hay bails, or pictures where a bail of hay just happens to be in the periphery of the image.
now, the irony is that i live in south dakota, farmland, so TECHNICALLY i should be able to take the digital cam out and snap a few shots of hay bails… however, my car is broke down, so i can’t even get out to my dad’s farm to do this. anyone know off the top of their head if there is a texture available i could use as a model to work from? or a place where there’d be a good picture? i’ve found one single one, on “squid” textures, but it’s got so much anti-theft imaging over top of it that it’s basically useless to me to use as a guide. thanks
just... one... texture!!!!
http://images.google.de/images?hl=de&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=heu&sa=N&tab=gi
“heu” is german for hay, i guess
hehe the first search has a hot chick in one picture and a chipmunk or something eating hay, so at least that was good for comedy/hot chick value… but most of the pictures don’t really have enough close up detail of the texture of the bail. the second picture has great texture, unfortunately it’s the round bail, and i’m working with rectangular ones (they’re going to be used as hiding spots, but not necessarily cover since they can be shot through 
)
http://www.dannewerk.de/kinderfest01/kinderfest%20strohballen.jpg
http://www.muehlen-nordsachsen.de/Fotoalbum/Kreativabend/Kreativabend_04-1.jpg
http://www.ponyhof.ch/images/BehiindertundNichtbehindert.jpg
just take your favourite image editing tool and do some blending, color adjustment
Shush! it was used in goldrush at the second Axis spawn. With a bit of brightness/contrast it could look like brand new hay … We even had a dead cow model ready for the hay but for some reason it got cut, god knows why !?!
Sock
:moo:
Sock do u have the dead cow model with you on your comp?
Never hurt a guy to have a dead cow model
i guess i didn’t even realize there was a hay texture in the pak0.pk3… everything’s always directly under my nose :disgust:
regardless, i used the round hay bail image that heeen had put up a link to to kind of cheat myself into a hay bail.
what i did was this- in photoshop, i used the filter>distort>polar coordinates, and selected polar to rectangular. this gave it an almost vertical set of hay strands. from there, i used edit>transform>perspective, and majorly deformed the picture at the bottom by dragging out, and the top i drug inwards, to create at least an area of straight vertical strands. from there i copied a patch of it, put it in a new file, added some slightly crappy bailing twine (red even!), and some slight shadowing to give the impression that the bailing twine is pressing into the bail, and voila, top/bottom of bail. then i cut that in half, moved some shading around to keep the "bordering’ sort of affect, and saved that as the “ends” of the bail. then i took the same image i used for the top of the bail, added noise, then used an alpha layer to make the noise pop out a bit, to give the “sides” of the bail the look of strands of hay sticking out (not sure how clear that description is).
from there, i had a single bail, but i figured making a ton of single bails would be fairly inefficient in game, soooo, i made tiled versions of each as well, with four examples of each texture side by side (bordered with a brown color i sampled out of the hay image itself, the first one, so they don’t blend together or look retarded), and made a few textures for bail stacks. so now i have the single bail textures, as well as the stack textures. i’m not sure they’re EXACTLY how i wanted them (what ever is?), but they’re functional at least.
i guess i’ve no idea why i went through the whole procedure except for my own good (…), but now, if you ever want a hay bail texture, there you go. hah. i’m putting some pictures in the post so i can see what everyone thinks i guess. these aren’t the “real” textures, as those are in tga format with alpha layers, etc. if you want to use these, though, for whatever reason, go ahead. i had a bastard of a time finding/making them, so hell if i save someone a step, sweet.
the original hay image
the warped out distorto hay image
the “sides” of the bails
the “top/bottom” of the bails
the “ends” of the bails
also- before i forget… dead cow model? hahah right on. the irony is that i was considering including a room in one building that served as a “slaughterhouse” so to speak, with a few cow carcasses hanging in it…
–edit
actually, come to think of it, the dividing lines i made witht he color i sampled out of the hay image so that the "stack’ didn’t look retarded make it look even more retarde3d 
any suggestions on how i can presereve divisions but no tmake them look so half-assed?