Bricks/Nether Bricks, Boats...

Note: I'll skip the upcoming billing cycle - you will not get charged on October 1st. I worked on a little bit different content this month which might not be interesting for a lot of you.

Hey!

First here are a few Vanilla textures I made:

• bricks and nether bircks + slabs/stairs/walls/fences   
  Both consist of 6 ctm repeat textures, so the pattern repetition shouldn't be too obvious. I'm going for an older look - I think it suits the oak planks quite well.

• oak and dark_oak boats:
  PTGI does not render boats well, so I tried to add some fake ambient occlusion by baking rendered GI/AO in blender and overlaying it onto the boat texture. it's okay...
  
• gravel:    Also one of the hardest blocks to texture because PTGI has no POM, no properly working normal maps and no specular maps (intensity control). Not sure if anyone can make "realistic" gravel textures for PTGI -  I can't.  Since the goal for the ATPM Pack isn't "photorealism", it's fine I guess.
  

DEPTH MAP  Creation Tool (Shader):

Before I continue R17 I needed a way to export very precise depth information directly from Minecraft. I couldn't find any mods/shaders that have the settings I needed so I decided to learn coding super basic shaders.  Here is a shader that renders Depth Maps in-game, with a lot of options/features. 

What are Depth Maps?  It's technical stuff, probably not interesting for a lot of you - but it's very simple:   Near objects are darker, far objects are brighter (Or the other way around if inverted - doesn't matter)
It's not a "fog shader" and not for gameplay - it's a technical tool - still fun to mess around.

Features:

• You can move the start and end points of the depth range. (smaller range = more precision)
• Show Clipping: Highlights areas that are out of range (100% black or white)
• Precision Balance slider:  You get the full range but you can get more precision/contrast on closer objects (or farther objects, depending on the direction you move the slider)
• 3 different linearization modes. Default, custom and one that gives you completely even precision across the screen. (creates a Linear sRGB gradient = even Color Banding across screen)
• Check Precision Mode:  visualizes the 8bit Color Banding with a stripe pattern.
• Works with all my custom models  (balls, spiral stairs, crossbow etc.).  Also works with players/mobs/entities.
• Dithering (see image below) 

These are the features I need for my stuff.  - The shader is mostly complete but feel free to recommend additional options. I might add a Normal-Map mode since this would allow you to completely change the lighting with post processing. 

Dithering on/off:  Minecraft screenshots are limited to only 256 grayscale values (8bit). To store more information in lower bit-depth images, dithering breaks/blurs the color bands with "noise". (the image above shows an 8bit screenshot with increased contrast. The left one is with dithering and later denoised/blurred in 16bit to remove the dithering noise.)

What can you do with depth maps?
I need it mainly for finding tiny errors in my custom models but usually depth maps are used for post processing and image manipulation. You can add effects based on distance from the camera. e.g. Fog, blur or other atmosphere effects, Depth of Field,  Adding objects behind other objects, easy alpha-masks, Turning still images into 3D animations, Dolly Zooms... The possibilities are endless.

Here are two 360° depth maps (rendered with replay-mod)