Sunflowers

During le Tour, you will always see the classic shot of the peloton riding past endless fields of sunflowers. To create that shot in RailSimilarity I'd need to get dirty with the procedural flora (grasspack.ace) and terrain textures to create myself a sunflower.

Here's the classic shot.

To recap, the procedural flora (if enabled of course) is a bunch of code created cruciforms that get placed on the terrain in the near-ground. They alpha out (fade out) over a short distance to keep the performance overhead down. Each terrain texture (the texture on the ground) can have an associated flora texture if desired.

Initially I created a simple terrain texture for the ground. This will be visible underneath the procedural flora. Remember that this will also be the texture that will be visible once the flora fades out in the distance.

Then I modified the grasspack.ace to include my sunflower. This will be the texure that gets mapped onto those little procedural flora cruciforms. This looks crude, but once it has the correct alpha channel and mapped onto the cruciforms, it works a treat.