NotSoRocky Hills Map Theme
I always lacked good looking, realistic theme with less rocky cliffs. There are some that have good textures and I ussually used Theme Mixer mod to mix textures from various themes. The downside was, I never really remembered which texture is from which theme and I lacked one good theme that fits my needs. It gave me motivation, despite not really liking theme editor, to finaly create and release new theme.
Screenshots above were taken on my new map – Donostia – San Sebastián.
Click HERE for european version of this Map Theme.
NotSoRocky Hills is temperate based map theme. I used a few custom, new textures with various levels of transparency to achieve effect I like.
The texture I focused most is of course cliff texture. It took me a couple hours to find good base images on the internet and create good looking, high resolution, seamless cliff texture with transparency which gave alpha blending that satisfied me. Thanks to this, mountain slopes are no more fully covered with rocky cliffs. Actual rock starts on steeper slopes, much higher than in default themes.
A few other textures has been changed and adjusted to achieve natural look. Some of you might find overlay of resources too bright or too dark, but I personally like more contrast and I just think it looks good. Feel free to test it and give feedback. I see no problems updating this theme as long as it remains satisfying to me.
I strongly suggest using Daylight Classic mod by Bloody Penguin. It gives much more natural look to the game and I think most LUT and theme creators suggest using it. The theme is playable without it, but in my opinion it does not look as good as with this mod.
The other option is to use Relight mod which gives you more possibilities to tweak lighting ingame and comes with a pack of nice looking LUTs.
And finally, Ultimate Eyecandy mod for even more options to adjust visuals to whatever you like.
My pick for color correction LUT for this theme is good old Definite Vision LUT by Captain Soap, which is one of my favourites as well and all of the screenshots above were taken using this LUT. I have tested a couple most popular LUTs and the theme looks well in most, so feel free to test it out and find the one that fits your needs.
Enjoy! 🙂
