More Arches, Colored Windows, & new gameplay-friendly project (Cardboard World)
Hey!
Today I've a new version of the funky models pack for you and some potential new survival textures/project.
• Fixed a lot of bugs with the windows and arches. Thanks to @artefox for pointing out very specific issues.
• Gave the vanilla stained glass panes a custom model which makes them thinner to allow them to fit in the window frames. Now you can build all the cool window shapes with colored glass (except ceiling windows and curved glass).
• Made the scaffolding end piece special so that you easily know when you reached the end. Also makes the whole thing look a bit more complex.
• More Arches: A frequent request was to follow the sculk vein arch concept and also make all the missing pieces. For example, placing 3 sculk veins in the corner of a room will give you a concave spherical corner piece.
• Added convex bevel corners (sphere octants) as some people requested. The open=true state is the inner corner. The powered=true state is the Ramp model so that you can also use it underwater since trapdoors can be waterlogged.
(Recommendation by @toastedmug)
• Added white concrete Slabs with height 4, 2 and 1 pixels. Similar to how R17 had snow layers textured as white concrete. But I want snow to remain vanilla because it's a very oldschool block. That's why I choose other blocks.
• Added rounded convex glass blocks that look a bit like ice cubes with iterationRP. Similar to the old convex glass blocks for PTGI. Sadly most other shaders that I tried gave very poor results.
• Added thin white walls (great in combination with glass panes and certain window/door elements)
• Brought back old content like the orange pool tiles and leather/fabric blocks.
• Expanded the test map with the new stuff
• Rebuilt parts of the R17 and R16 map for funkymodels. (also included on the test map)
The Funky Models pack is now basically a completely reworked and improved version of almost all the core "rendering content" from 2019-2020 (PTGI). I'll still keep the old rendering content downloads available. IterationRP is objectively better than PTGI in most cases - but things like the unlimited GI bounces make PTGI still very special to me. Also, since the old textures and maps were optimized for PTGI, many scenes simply still look way better with PTGI.
What's next?
Funky Models got quite a lot of attention on social media compared to my previous attempts, which was really cool to see. But there are very few people who actually use the pack, which might seem strange at first. But I think people like to watch the videos mostly because of the "circles in minecraft" meme - and not because of rendering/architecture aspects. It's very "niche" content and in order for someone to actually use it in-depth, you would have to have a serious interest in rendering/architecture stuff.
But that's not surprising, this has always been the case with the rendering stuff. "Cool to watch, but tricky to replicate yourself while playing."
And this was one reason why in 2021 I stopped the main project and tried creating "gameplay friendly textures" instead - in order to have content that is also useful for the average minecraft player. But the showcase videos that I released for these gameplay textures got almost no views which is why I abandoned the project again. My guess is that it's because "realistic minecraft texture packs" are nothing new and people have seen enough. There are already countless "realistic" packs and they tend to have the same style/feel.
So yeah, I've been trying to come up with some new survival project that is both interesting enough to get views but is also useful for normal gameplay. There have been some really unique cool texture pack concepts in the past. For example the Lego-styled packs that basically turn the entire Minecraft world into Legos. (e.g. Brickcraft)
Something that I think has potential is to turn all blocks into one type of material. e.g. "Everything is made of clay or play-doh" etc…. Or "everything is made of candy"… But it also has to be feasable from a technical standpoint. I can't just give every block rounded corners as I did with funky models. That would be way too laggy. A theme that I think is the most promising so far: "Everything is made of cardboard and other arts and crafts materials" (tape, fabric, popsticles, maybe aluminium foil for metal, … ). I think this immediately makes cool ideas pop into your mind e.g. a cactus could be a green cardboard box + toothpicks for the thorns. I really don't want to just give the vanilla textures a cardboard-ish look - I want to use completely custom models and come up with creative ways to produce the shape with cardboard pieces.
The block that I used to test this cardboard idea/concept: Wood Logs. The rings that make up the core of the log is a roll of some sort of thick paper material. And the tree bark is multiple layers of corrugated cardboard wrapped around the outside. I think that's a cool idea and I'd love for every block to have some unique twist like that. To make it fun to look at every block closely. It's a first test and the main goal was to see if this whole idea is technically possible - and to learn how to create realistic looking cardboard.
I made a few basic cardboard assets that I can now reuse to hopefully produce textures
faster. But of course I have to test if people are even interested in such a cardboard pack.
Would love to hear feedback :)
Shaders & Version:
For the cardboard I really like Sundial Lite (with tonemap set to AgX). Very fast and handles the high frequency detail (top part) very well. IterationRP would be my 2nd choice but can be noisy. Obviously you need POM enabled. The version is Java 1.21.11+ because I use the new block model format.
DOWNLOADS:
As always, the downloads can be found on the download post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/127595168