Dev news : bricks and much more

I tried reworking most of the stone/blackstone blocks the last couple of days (mostly bricks) and came up with some major improvements. I also spent a bit of time revisiting some other blocks like warped doors, bone blocks, slime blocks, or scaffolding. Check out the changes below with lots of screenshots!

Blackstone, side, top, gilded

You can see here that I chose to bring back more “square” features to blackstone, while retaining some overall roundness to the shapes -albeit with a lower balance-. I slightly redesigned the gilded variants as well, and used a custom, hand-made pattern for the top texture too:

As can be seen in some screenshots I increased the smoothness on gold flakes in the gilded blackstone texture. I tried keeping the heightmap as high as possible to minimize artifacts while keeping enough depth.

STONE BRICKS, mossy, cracked, chiseled, lodestone

I also greatly improved regular stone bricks as well as their variants (cracked, mossy, chiseled, lodestone -which I consider a block similar to chiseled stone bricks):

You see it’s much more detailed on the edges, and it’s using a more detailed, less soft texture.

Polished blackstone, bricks, cracked bricks, chiseled bricks

Next thing I wanted to see improved was the polished blackstone group, as I already worked on improving the “rough” counterpart to these blocks. I made edges much more angled and sharp for the regular polished block, and improved the edges like I did for regular stone bricks in the case of polished blackstone bricks.

Stairs also work pretty well with the polished blackstone revamp. I added some morning-light reflections on polished blackstone bricks (regular, chiseled, cracked), as well as block light with SSPT (Chocapic, Kappa, Loop) or full PT (Chronos, KappaPT, SEUS PTGI, MollyVX)

Warped door and trapdoor

You remember seeing improved crimson-related blocks a couple of days ago. There was a block I hadn’t redesigned/improved yet: crimson doors and trapdoors. That’s what I’ve been working on today, and I mostly improved the overall shapes and height/relief details. It looks much more consistent than before now, while remaining Vanilla. There are not many points of reference for such fantasy blocks, but I tried doing something relevant and believable.

Bone blocks

I also changed how bones are generated, improving some details and redesigning the shape to minimize POM artifacts. I added roundness to the side blocks, and lots of AO with deeper heightmap for the marrow parts. Again, most world-space PT shaders were used for night shots.

MISCELLANEOUS

Lastly, I fiddled here and there with some blocks, like slime or scaffolding.

I merely improved the clarity and sharpness of details on the slime block, but the difference shouldn’t be night and day anyway. Here’s a screenshot with with BSL v8.0.02.10d :

Scaffolding also got improved with regards to their normals/heightmaps. I added some volume to the normals, and used a (shallow) heightmap to give some depth to the various parts.

See how the central “net” or lattice now has some depth to it, as if it was made of interwoven thin bamboo branches.