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Alpha blending repeating textures

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Microneezia polycounter lvl 10
Hello there,

I am using 3ds max9. I also have UEd3 which I would like to export to. I have a large land mass and I would like to blend 2 different repeating textures, grass on top, rock on sides. I also have a normal map I would like to add.

Is it possible to do the following?

Normal map, all the uv's in the 0-1 box. - map channel 1

First Diff Texture - Grass 512 tiling- map channel 2 - UV's are blow way out of the 0-1 box to tile the texture.

Second Diff Texture - Stone 512 tiling - map channel 3 - UVs are again sized wayy up outside the 0-1 box to tile the texture.

Now I want to blend the first and second texture in specific areas? I dont see how this is done in max or in unreal ed? Is this the best way to go about the tiling when you plan to blend the textures?

What is the most common/effective way to blend tiling textures in max9 when planning to export to Ued?

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  • Microneezia
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    Microneezia polycounter lvl 10
    I tried using the composite material in max along with the vertex paint masks and setting map channels to the specific tiling textures within the composite material.... it works, but does Unreal ed have similar ways to mix tiled textures? Im new with unreal ed, just finished watching the 3dbuzz videos... havent done much exporting into it yet.

    Also, I could tile the texture with the U and V tiles in max with no UV unwrap or unwrap and scale up the UV's in order to tile the texture (keeping the normal map on a seperate map channel?) im unsure how this translates into Ued. Will Ued understand how ive scaled up the UV's outside of the 0-1 box? Ive also read in one of CHoldens tutorials he talks about using UVWmapping in the stack and directly mapping to the face and tiling the texture by face. This is great i guess for tiling a specific section of a larger texture, but it seems the most unrealistic though for organic shapes as the texture is the size of each face, so if the faces are not evenly spaced its a disaster?

    What im looking for is the most convienient or most common way to set this up in max for preview, when planning to export into unreal ed.

    any help is greatly appreciated
  • warby
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    warby polycounter lvl 18
    no idea about displaying it in max but unreal its definitely possible what you are trieng to do:

    http://www.hourences.com/book/tutorialsue3mated3.htm

    the second tutorial on that page Blending textures by using the Vertex Colors ... its actually even more advanced than what you are trieng to do but the basics are explained too
  • Microneezia
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    Microneezia polycounter lvl 10
    Thanks for pointing that out Warby!

    He says that you can collapse vector paint masks into the Max object and import those into Ued. Good to know. At the time he wrote that however he was using the Mix material in Max, instead of composite, so he mentions that only 2 textures can be mixed. Which is true for mix, however I think with composite i can mix more than 2 textures and just keep stacking vector masks.

    I wonder if I can collapse all of those into the object and export, then when i add the vector color material to the mask slot in Ued, will the multiple masks be imported? I mean more than 2?

    Well it looks like vector masks is really the way to go for blending. He didnt really address my questions about specifically how to tile the texture across a large surface... There must be UV tiling nodes that I can feed into a UV imput I guess on the texture sample node? but I still wonder, If I scale up all the UV's in max outside the 0-1 box area, will UnEd understand that placement?
  • CrazyButcher
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    CrazyButcher polycounter lvl 18
    check vertexcolor blend .fx
    http://www.luxinia.de/index.php/ArtTools/3dsmaxFX

    could be adopted to add normalmap or whatever support you want.
  • Microneezia
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    Microneezia polycounter lvl 10
    Oh this looks great, I will definitely try this out, unfortunately my video card had its fan melt off last week so im using intel onboard video right now... I cant test it out yet as I dont have direct X without my card. Im sure it gives a close representation to what I'd find using Ued tho! So thats exactly what I was looking for.

    I have saved the .fx file tho, thanks a lot!
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