How to paint terrain using few textures?

ebbob

Hello,

Does anyone know how to paint terrain correctly?

I have about 10 tileable textures and I assign each texture to terrain face, but the result looks horrible. Is there a way to use masks or something?

Please help.

Eric Chadwick

Yes. Which game engine? (it's best to put the software in your title, here's why)

We have a lot of tips here.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Landscape

And here too
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/MultiTexture

ebbob

I paint terrain in 3ds Max, I just assign material ID to a face. But all scene will be exported to Unity...

Eric Chadwick

The basic method is to paint mask textures to blend between a few tiled textures.

You can paint the masks in 3ds Max, but it's usually easier to paint them in the game engine.

Check the wiki for tips. I shared some stuff in my Sketchbook too.

ebbob

Thank you very much for your advices, when I get home I will look for the solution...

Mark Dygert

Personally I would use a tool like Unreal, it is really good at generating and manipulating terrain. It's really good for painting in material layers then using those layers to scatter things like, grass meshes on the grass layer, rocks on the dirt layer, in addition to letting  you paint scatter trees, bushes, rocks any mesh that you wanted to pump into it really.

Check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lx-drupqls

In addition to Unreal you might want to look into World Creator or World Machine which is a good way to get some great looking terrain generated really quick and imported into unreal.

Alex_J

The unity asset store has a few in-editor tools that aren't too spendy and can make terrain generation, texture blending, and object spawning pretty easy and flexible. 

I'd recommend Gaia, Vegetation Studio, Microsplat, Complete Terrain Shader, Map Magic, if you prefer to work in the game engine to do this sort of thing. 

SnowInChina

i`ve wondered for a long time, it there a breakdown how they did the standart league of legends map ?

Eric Chadwick

Not exactly a LoL level art breakdown, but a great read on art direction...
https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/features/dev-blog-defining-rifts-visual-style

Also a bit here...
https://web.archive.org/web/20140607015052/https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/features/dev-blog-updating-summoners-rift

ebbob

I don't need to generate terrain, I have generated terrain and I only require to paint it. As I said right now I paint textures in 3ds max by assigning material ID to each face, but the result is awful. Are there tools in unity (or max) that allow paint texture masks or something like this?

Eric Chadwick

Guess you didn't look at the links I posted. Oh well.

ebbob

I looked at those likns, but mostly there were how to paint terrain in Unreal or things... I'll look one more time, sorry I am a bit messy.

Eric Chadwick

If you're doing terrain for use in Unity, it's best to paint it directly in Unity. So you can see how it looks from the player's perspective, and how it works with props & scene geometry..

You already have a mesh, so you just need to decide whether to use a splat map to paint the blending masks, or to use vertex color to paint same. 

You need a shader that supports that type of blending. And you need a painting tool.

SnowInChina

thanks eric, great read

Mark Dygert

Terrain systems are pretty complex sets of tools that do a lot of things for you. It's not just spitting out lumpy terrain but like Eric pointed out it also handles the complex layered material.

The mesh you are using isn't set up to do vertex blending, it will need a lot more verts if you're going to paint masks into the vertex color channel(s). You can handle it by UV mapping your terrain and painting explicit masks but then you need worry about the resolution of the masks and how it's UV mapped.

Either way, vertex or explicit textures, if you're doing it in 3dsmax you'll need to use the "composite map/material". It allows you to layer different textures and mask them out. It's kind of a pain in the ass because they are all stacked on top of each other so each higher layer will block the others from showing up and you have to mask out those higher layers. It's a pretty tedious process in 3dsmax, but is handled much better in Unreal or Unity.

Usually the terrain is subdivided and tessellates based on camera/player proximity, this helps with performance, it also usually manages height maps. The level of tessellation gives you enough verts to paint those masks into the vertex color channels and create soft or hard gradients that aren't dependent on textures.

So the mesh you have won't let you use the most common method of blending, not enough verts. Personally, it would be faster to recreate what you have in an actual terrain system because so many of those tools just aren't in 3dsmax and it's going to take 10x longer and be way more labor intensive.

SnowInChina

you could bake a heightmap in 3dsmax and import that into unity

Eric Chadwick

I shared a ton of my 3ds Max & Unity workflow in my sketchbook, it's all there for the taking.