Seeking solution to overlay hexel map to give painterly look

Alex_J

Does anybody know of a way, either by writing a shader or by some other jerry-rigged means, to take a map that is built from physical hex's, like my prototype below....

and overlay an effect that would add a painterly grunge which sort of blurs it all together to get something akin to this:

Now I understand that this map from Total War is constructed in an entirely different way -- for our purpose we got to work with hex's but if anybody knows of some trick to kind of get a more blended effect that would be enormously appreciated. I'll give you a free copy of the game if interested.

I'm thinking something like plane that sits above the map, and some kind of light shifting shader with a grunge mask?

Eric Chadwick

There are likely multiple ways you could do this.

I would capture the whole map out to a new terrain blend texture, transcoding the hex colors into splat mask colors, and applying that to a terrain.

So each hex color would end up as a mask for a different terrain tiling texture. Tan hexes could be sand, green hexes could be farm fields, blue could be wavy water, white could be snowy mountains, etc.

You could distort the edges with a normal map as uv distortion on the splat mask.

Alex_J

thanks Eric, we'll give that a try.

RyanB

First thing that comes to mind is a parallax shader.  https://www.habrador.com/tutorials/shaders/3-parallax-mapping/

Alex_J

Implementation of something like Eric's suggestion probably wont happen until the end as the goal is to make the game in 6 weeks, so we have to prioritize task really carefully, but we made a pretty simple solution which gets a little closer to the goal..

Just a simple world space texture. This at least makes the similar textured tiles merge seamlessly.