Crown Mountains
I made this map theme on impulse because I got frustrated trying to find a nice high-detail cliff texture, so, uh, enjoy! It focuses a lot on mountains, not sure how it would look on other types of maps though. Generally, I was trying to go for the aesthetic of the Northwestern US on this theme; those are the types of maps that would work best with it. Now, when taking screenshots of your cities, you don’t have to be ashamed of the natural landscapes in the background!
In general, I designed this theme to be an all-purpose theme that can work for all circumstances, close-up and far-away. The Cliff texture has very large tiling, while the normals have a much smaller tiling – this allows for two different levels of detail by placing the brunt of distance shots on the diffuse texture, with the normals (normal maps affect how shadows are displayed on a 3D object) subbing in for close-up shots. Similarly, the grass texture is overlaid with a different texture so as to achieve multiple layers of detail. In addition, I combined the diffuse maps, specularity (highlights) and ambient occlusion (shadows in crevices) maps of the textures together in order to create an extra feeling of depth.
I recommend playing around with LUTs and Theme Mixer 2 until you get a satisfactory result; each map is different after all. A setup that works for one map can look horrible on another one — just keep experimenting until you get a nice result on your map.
I uploaded the old version as a separate workshop item; the style of this new update might be too far off from the original, after all. Link To Old Version
The map used in the screenshots is a vanilla map — Frozenshire — unfrozen with Environment Changer. Trees are Greyflame’s Douglas Fir Trees.
- Ultimate Eyecandy with Global Light Intensity 5.0, and Ambient Light Intensity ~1.2. In the LUT tab, disable Bloom and Tonemapping.
- Relight with Relight Past LUT. The Tonemapping settings are irrelevant since you’re disabling that with Ultimate Eyecandy; the lighting settings are up to you.
- PostProcessFX with Bloom enabled, with 0.3 Intensity and 0.5 Threshold, Spread maxed for both sliders. Ambient Occlusion is also turned on, with intensity cranked up.
- Sun Shafts
- Sharp Textures
- Shadow Strength Adjuster
- AD Cloud Replacer with Old Outdoor Theater. Play with settings until you get a satisfactory result.
- I would love to give instructions for Play It! and Render It! but I seriously just could not get good results out of them; if anyone would give me satisfactory settings for both of those mods I would gladly place them here.
Update: 9th of September, 2022
Retouched a vast majority of the textures in order to have more depth and detail. Took new screenshots accordingly.
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
