#the Thone of Arlen

[dduane]

Some texture testing on the Throne of Arlen, which is having its previous (frankly kinda crude) surfaces and textures pulled off it and new ones applied.

Color differences between the carved areas and the plain wood are being kept to a minimum at the moment until the positions of the carved stuff, and the places where there should be nothing but wood grain, have been sorted out. This is partly because there are three separate graphics files responsible for the colors and the appearance of the 3D features, and balancing their effects off against one another gets complicated. It's also partly because I haven't yet made final decisions about what whitestave wood (which the Throne is made of) looks like when it weathers. And how it weathers.

(For those curious, the our-Earth "behavioral" model for this kind of wood is Pinus cembra, the Swiss stone pine or Arolla pine, called arvenholz on its own turf. It's an extremely durable, slow-growing, dense-grained and fragrant wood, much used for construction and in furniture [like what you can see here]. Arvenholz starts its life with a very pale cream-colored grain, and over the years weathers down to white, silver or shades of dark silver-grey, depending on conditions. While Middle Kingdoms whitestave wood isn't a member of the pine family but rather of the Oleaceae—see the bottom of this article for details—whitestave and arvenholz could otherwise easily be mistaken for each other in terms of the way they weather.)

Anyway, rebuilding this piece of furniture is being complicated by having to reverse-engineer the new textures from the original ones... improving them where possible and otherwise making the desired changes in what are sometimes kludgy and imperfect ways. Places where the wood's been smoothed completely light over centuries of handling or polishing are going to have to be rendered that way by hand-erasing the texture overlays—or artificially building them up with custom brushing, depending on how given files express (or fake) height or texture.

(shrug) What can I say? I'm a glutton for punishment. ...Meanwhlle, the King's expression suggests that this particular cat's position may possibly lack long-term stability. :) Better his problem than mine...

#Middle Kingdoms meta #whitestave #Arlen #the Thone of Arlen