Texture splatting in photoshop?

NAIMA

Hi i was reading this interesting article on. Textur splatting in game engine

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AndreyMishkinis/20130716/196339/Advanced_Terrain_Texture_Splatting.php

But I wanted to find a tutorial that allowed to do the same in photoshop ... Any ideas , tips or sugestions ?

EarthQuake

Use a layer mask?

kurt_hectic

If for input you have only this 2 textures you should select the black color on the rock texture and use this selection as a mask.

You are unable to do any magic tricks here.

leleuxart

Besides layer masking, there's a nifty little blend feature in the Layer Style window for each layer. It can be a little noisy though.

Eric Chadwick

If you put a heightmap in the layer mask, you can dodge/burn the mask to get a similar effect. It's destructive though, after a bit of editing you can't get back to the original heightmap.

NAIMA

I am not sure but ... woudl someone explain me in Photoshop equivalent terms what the guy is explaining in the page I linked?

it talks about multiplying opacity or color map , but in photoshop terms?

Eric Chadwick

You can't do shader math in Photoshop, as far as far as I know. So there is no equivalent.

You could make two layers, sand below, stones above, and put a stones height map in a layer mask for the stones layer, then edit that mask. But you can't use math to edit the transitions.

The equivalent would be to use Pattern layers for sand and stone, then paint your "opacity map" (which really isn't opacity, but a blend map) as a layer mask, to control where sand appears vs. stones.

Additionally you would need to modulate the blend map (layer mask) with a height map, which really isn't possible in PS within a layer mask.

tharle

you can use a combination of blend if grey and blend if grey underlying layer and then nested layer masks for this sort of effect in photoshop. remember you can group a single layer and then layer mask is repeatedly so it's easy to control separate parts of the total mask - ie a gradient, a procedural noise/clouds filter, a hand painted mask etc. that way it's much easier to rework later.

throttlekitty

Eric Chadwick wrote: »

Additionally you would need to modulate the blend map (layer mask) with a height map, which really isn't possible in PS within a layer mask.

Assuming that we do want to want to also do the secondary blend, but I think that NAIMA just wants to do the simpler part; a single image with sand sitting properly between the rocks.

You can group layers and apply masks to the group object to handle the blending between materials there, with the height map for the stones applied as a mask to the sand layer.

edit: i just greyscaled the stones, inverted and levels to make that mask on the quick.