UDK Vertex Paint refresher

Acid_Wire

So..
I'm going to feel like an absolute moron for even posting this, given that I (at least claim to) have a good amount of UDK experience, but it has to be done.
It seems like I've forgotten everything worth knowing about Vertex Painting, which is currently frustrating me to no end, and the tutorials that I watched some time ago (and now re-watched) don't seem to help. I'm having an issue with the vertex painting being a little odd-looking - something which I have not actually encountered when I previously used it with almost the same material setup. I thought that if I simply plugged the Vertex Colour into the alpha of the LERP, the blend would be smooth - which was what I wanted, given that I'm trying to create dark patches on a road for use with puddles.

See:


A lot of the beginner-level tutorials (it's ridiculous that I'm having to re-watch material like this) have the painting looking like this in the vertex colour view, but the Lit or Unlit view will display the two LERPed textures blending into each other no problem.
The plane I'm using for this did have 300 tris, and I boosted it to a ridiculous 3,000 just to see if that helped.
Am I missing something here or just being an idiot? I thought smooth transitions were the default in a simple VP material setup, which is why you need more nodes if you want plaster to brick sort of transitions?

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TL;DR: Want to make road wetness & puddles like in the new NFS Most Wanted, but apparently I forgot literally every damn thing about this feature and don't know what I'm doing.

leleuxart

Using the Vertex Color as the alpha is supposed to give you the "soft" transition, but that requires more vertices. I find that using a mask helps, that's kind of negating the purpose of the smooth transition. Even with a mask, using it at anything higher than 50% strength gives horrible results, much like your example. What was the strength that you used? Using it around 0.1-0.3(if I'm remembering the values correctly) gives the best results with and without a mask, but you have to basically treat the tool like a stamp and continuously press the mouse.

ambershee

You need to also paint in less than absolutes. Your painted verts look like they are masked at 100%, when really you should be painting them more softly.