Blending of textures in PS2
polycounter lvl 3
Hello.
I was trying to create some scenes in the styles of games like Shadow of the Colossus, and Final Fantasy 11.
I got curious about how these games deal with texturing.
FF11, when you look ingame, the assets seems to have blending textures:
But then I saw a video where a person extracted this assest into unreal, and the textures are sharp and not blending:
For Shadow of the colossus, I noticed the same thing:
The transition of textures seems to be blending. But when I saw a model that was extracted from the game, look how the textures are sharp:
So I guess my question is, how do you think this was done? Did PS2 used multitexturing and blended the textures with vertex alpha?
Some of the techniques pointed here?
Thanks for the help.
Replies
I wouldn't pay much attention to how the exported models look, it's quite likely that they've just done something incorrectly during the export that's broken the textures/shader. I think you're right in that it's using vertex colours for blending, although even if it's not, that's going to give you the effect you want anyway, no?
Yes you are right. I know that this is common for terrain. Could I do this for many assets? Like those walls in the FF11 prints? Would it be expensive on the performance of a game?
looks like a vertex base blend "uniform broad gradients" with texture based you tend to get more "noise" and variation
It's not expensive at all, even to modulate the blend with a heightmap or grayscale detail (sand in the cracks of the rocks). We used it for a mobile game with Unity, worked great.
Allright! Thank you everybody for the answers! Now I know in what direction to go.
Might even be just floating geometries with vertex/map alpha on some of those screenshots.
It was already used for sure on N64. (I was so impressed back then xD)
Note that we still use this approach, for "breaking" 90 degrees angles on walls for instance.
Maybe splatting was a bit heavy for those platforms as it requires several texture samples per pixel for a big screen surface. Could have been used on some chunks tho.
Yes, I thought something like that could have been used. I just wonder, if it was used on walls it would be like an ancient form of decal? Would there problems like artifacts from clipping?
Yep it's totally mesh decals. From afar, yes there can be zfight issues. Depending of you camera clipping settings and zbuffer precision, you'd need to offset the mesh from the underlying object so the engine can sort the pixels properly. This can also be done through the shader and distance to the camera :
https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/WorkingWithContent/MeshDecals/
Uuu, that is really interesting. Thank you for sharing!