I’ve spent a bit of time trying to remove unnecessary data from the normal- and material-maps. The blocks with alpha stencil are mostly prone to having useless data where the alpha value is transparent.
Here’s an example with the blue orchid flower. Notice how the mask was spreading the stem pattern everywhere except where the flowers require their own texture.
The relevant mask being the alpha channel of the albedo/colormap texture
(There is one notable exception to this, it’s for Bedrock and MCPE editions that require the grass side block to have relevant color data where the alpha is transparent. Most programs simply discard color information on PNG’s on transparent parts, which WILL cause issues with Bedrock/MCPE overlays. Learned this the hard way.)
Anyways, there were quite a bit of blocks that used to have extraneous details because of the way I did the masking. Those values take space on disk because they compress pretty badly. VRAM-wise it doesn’t change anything as images are decompressed in video memory so each pixel counts, even if they all have the same value). This will do a difference to disk space though (and possibly RAM, but not sure on this point) which is still nice.
In other news, I’m working on getting complete 1.17 support for the MCPE YSS shader as well. Here are some screenshots of the currently working blocks. I’m actively working on this.
Remember I also have other projects, and your support on those would help me tremendously! Check out my patreon page (which is my main page, using USD) or my buymeacoffee.com page if you’d rather use EUR.
HardTop Vanillaccurate 