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3ds max terrain with texture mask setup

polycounter lvl 13
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breakneck polycounter lvl 13
hey all I'm having a hard time setting up a material that blends terrain materials together using masks.

I have 3 textures (rock, dirt, grass) and i have 3 height masks that correspond to where these textures show up on my geo. What I need help with is setting up a material in 3ds max that functions similar to how you would set up a terrain material with masks in a game engine - like what you see here: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/TerrainAlphamaps.html

anyhelp would be awesome - thanks

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  • THE 5
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    THE 5 polycounter lvl 13
    You probably knew that but there is the material "Blend" to combine different materials with a Mask as input. Also there is the Map called "Mix" (put for example in the diffuse slot of your material) where you can blend two maps into each other using a mask aswell.

    Don't know if that is similar to the way one would do it in UDK though, I did not use it so far :/
  • breakneck
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    breakneck polycounter lvl 13
    ahhh, not quite as user friendly as I would expect it to be - for some reason I can't view the blend or the mix material in my viewport. But anyways, so what i did was create a blend material then did a standard mix material in one of the blend slots - is what I'm guessing you're talking about.

    but with it not rendering in the viewport for some reason, this really is a pain in the ass to have to render everytime i want to view a change i make.
  • Mark Dygert
    Yep blends are a pain because they don't show up only when rendered at least they did the last time I used them. I got around it by because I was using vertex paint and you can get that mask to display in the viewport (not the actual blended materials just the blend mask) then I would do quick renders with shadows turned off.

    ShaderFX is free, is node based, and displays blends in the viewport, I would check it out.
  • breakneck
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    breakneck polycounter lvl 13
    Vig: does a ShaderFX material work with baking a Render to Texture?
  • Mark Dygert
    I lean toward maybe but I've never tried it. I know it is kind of spotty with regular rendering. The great thing about shaderfx is that you can export the shaders you make and import them into anything that supports them. I think you can export a cgfx or hlsl which you might be able to wrangle into max another way.
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