Stone1m is a very useful mask that leaves the texture unchanged except when a transparent surface is placed in front of the masked object -- the rendered area of the masked object then itself is rendered as transparent. Here's a screenshot from another angle that shows this clearly:
As I said, this is very useful to create windows on facades that are very inexpensive users of cell space. To demonstrate, I'll share another facade for a building I completed in Elkins Beach this week.
We start with the base selection of objects:
For this facade, we want a simple wall panel to cover the entire span of the wall. This piece will contain the stone1m masked texture, and the windows will be placed on it. We also want a transparent object -- winb2.rwx is a rectangular window that supports the optional texture "tag" parameter:
Texture the frame:
create texture topgrey tag=1
Texture the pane:
create texture topgrey tag=200
Finally, we'll use p1rec0005g.rwx to add some depth and break the different levels of the facade apart. So we can arrange the facade objects in the location we want:
And then add textures, masks, and scale:
For a final result of 9 objects:
# Object Purpose Action
1 w1pan_1000j.rwx masked surface create texture tv4 mask=stone1m
4 winb2.rwx windows create texture topgrey tag=1,scale 3 1 0.1
4 winb2.rwx windows create texture topgrey tag=1,scale 3 1 0.1
4 p1rec0005g.rwx depth/detail create texture topgrey,scale 1 1 5
With this base facade completed, I replicated it out into a larger rectangular building and added some additional detailing as wall dormers and some street-level shops. The street-level shops are currently complete, but the overall structure is done:
And that's that! Feel free to share your own examples of this technique in the comments! This is a very common technique in AlphaWorld and I enjoy seeing new and creative implementations of it.
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