Blending textures (no smooth transition) [3D]

PinkestElephant

Hello everyone!

First I would like to apologize because I am very new to 3D. I've used unity a little and experimented with 2D. I think I want to try some 3D in Unreal now.

So in 2D we have tiles:


I can paint the grass tiles in and then add the dirt and autotiles gives me a nice clean transition.

I looked at Zelda links awakening for switch and I adore the graphics.


How would you go about making the transition from grass to dirt there? I read a little about vertex blending but that would just give me a smooth gradient transition? Do you think it's something very complex? Or is two textures on top of each other and the dirt area is just masked out?

I would really like to learn more about this stuff so if anyone has any ideas or articles I can read or tutorials I can watch I would be very grateful.

Thank you all for reading.

RN

I think that that environment is built like a 2D tilemap, but done with quads in 3D.

The art has a higher fidelity than pixel-art obviously, like using normal maps so that details can "pop" out of the tiles and react to lighting, as well as decoration in the form of flowers, rocks etc. besides the ground tiles.

I think you can get a lot of inspiration, if not even ideas, from what people are making with that Crocotile 3D software and the kind of meshes that it outputs. These screens are from there:

Sketchfab of the model below: skfb.ly/6QVwT

Hm, the author seems to have posted on PC before: https://polycount.com/discussion/152907/crocotile-3d-a-new-3d-modeling-tool-that-acts-like-a-2d-map-editor

PinkestElephant

Thank you so much RN for taking time out of your day to help. 
What you posted is so useful and really made me understand it a lot better.
I'm gonna read through the polycount link you posted now and look more at Crocotile3D art.

Thanks again!