Outland Lower Cliff Texturing

[Zalfos]

Hello everyone.
I've got a question.

I'm currently working on a Reforged map that's supposed to look like the top of a mountain ; a really high one. To make it a bit unique, I decided to look around and try to use the Outlands cliff texturing. Outland is a pretty unique tileset, because one of the cliffs (Rough Dirt Cliff) is supposed to always open into an Abyss tile. So my idea was to use the Abyss tile, combined with fog and weather, to simulate a mountain summit.

I figured that replacing the two cliff textures (and the tiles associated with them) would do the trick nicely. Anyway, Outland Rough Dirt Cliff looks like that (when you remove the water) :

By looking it closely, it's clear that Blizzard is using a trick here : the lower part of the cliff is kept darkened, so that it blends into the Abyss tiles. To hide it from view during play, they then use the special water in Outland tileset, which creates black fog near the "shores" of the floating islands.

What I don't understand is how this darkening of the lower cliff is defined. It doesn't looks like it's part of the Outland_RoughDirt_diffuse.dds, so it must be in the Cliff1_diffuse.dds. Now, the Outland Cliff1 looks like this :



It's a bit of an oddball, as some of it is kept transparent, probably because it's a special cliff. But nothing here defines that the lower part must be darkened. When I did retexture it a bit with Northrand Snow cliff, I got this :



But it's no good. When I use it as a skin for Cliff1, it gets me this.

It's close, but the lower part is not darkened, whereas I'd like it to be.

Did I screw up while doing my own custom .dds, or is it that I missed something ?

Any ideas ?

 

[The_Silent]

That is weird. Is probably some sort of hard-coded behavior screwing you over. I don't know if anyone have had to deal with this before, so I guess you have to play around and see what works.

I can see that some of the texture shines through the alpha layer as if it were not alphaed. Maybe the alphaed parts have to be black. So that it is literally fading to black.

 

[Zalfos]

That is weird. Is probably some sort of hard-coded behavior screwing you over. I don't know if anyone have had to deal with this before, so I guess you have to play around and see what works.

I can see that some of the texture shines through the alpha layer as if it were not alphaed. Maybe the alphaed parts have to be black. So that it is literally fading to black.

Indeed. I got around this idea, the result is not so bad.

It's quite better. The lower part with the white artifacts is no big deal, since it's going to be covered with fog and the special water waves. But the black ones on the snow are a bit more problematic.
Now you can't really do anything about them, because they will affect both parts of the cliff (if I color the pixels in them in white, the same white pixels will appear on my black lower cliff).

I played around them for a while, and I settled on the middle ground.

Far from perfect, but the fine gears of this game are not up to me. With weather and water, it looks decent enough.

Thanks for the idea. I'll drop my .dds here is someone wants it in the future.