Terrain Texturing Tips

Puck

I'm currently throwing together a little scene (3D Max) for fun, just roughing it out at the moment and feeling my way forward, learning as I go, but i've hit a bit of a roadblock, what is the best way of going about texturing the terrain itself?

As it stands i've just tiled a generic grass texture all over a subdivided plane that i've pushed and prodded much like you would in any regular level editor, be it Unreal or whatever (as opposed to using a height map which I find rather unruly).....but obviously I don't want grass everywhere, I'd like to be able to seamlessly transition between dirt, rock, pavement etc

So, what are my options?

Do I paint one massive texture? Or is that overly excessive and wasteful? Granted i'm only doing this for the sake of doing it and it'll only be used in a static render, but if there are better techniques i'd like to learn to use them.

Also is there anyway to sort of "sketch" onto the plane in 3D max itself as a rough guide (ergo, road goes here, buildings are here, tracks are here) for when I actually export and start painting the UVW map, or do I just guesstimate with a lot of back and forth between the programs?

Would it be better to split the terrain up into half a dozen meshes, each with their own UVW map and try to blend the seems with some clever photoshoppery?

A fleeting thought I had, but something i've never really worked with or tried was creating a multi-sub object material. Assign a dirt, a grass and a rock texture, each with opacity maps and then tile that over the entire plane.....would that work or something along the same lines?

Quick pic for reference.





Love,

Puck

[HP]

I'd use a multi-sub object material with at least 3 or 4 diferent terrain textures.
Obviously (i guess), there is no easy way to properly blend textures in max, like SandBox2 editor, like this:


So, probably your best bet would be to hide the seams with props and / or decals.

Ahrkey

3dsmax have something called a Blend material.


Try it out or look it up in the help.

(Image stolen from http://www.dmmultimedia.com/3dtips_09c.htm)

kio

there is a better way

use a composite material - setup the different materials and then it gets a little tricky, you paint opacity masks for the different mats - i used a 3d painter prototype script which let me paint the masks directly onto the geometry (i used a .fx shader to get realtime feedback of the mixed terrain material). works pretty cool, you might have to come up with a clever workflow to handle the different masks though...

Target_Renegade

Yeah, use a composite material, you can then use normal maps and lots of textures on one terrain. This took me ages to find and is the best example imo, its by a guy called Kevin Oxland:

http://www.kevinoxland.com/Images/Layers_Unlimited.pdf

Puck

Awesome, thanks for the suggestions, i'll dig out my books and have quick look for some tutorials regarding the composite and blend material options, both seem to be better options then creating an uber texture.

Edit:

Target_Renegade wrote: »

Yeah, use a composite material, you can then use normal maps and lots of textures on one terrain. This took me ages to find and is the best example imo, its by a guy called Kevin Oxland:

http://www.kevinoxland.com/Images/Layers_Unlimited.pdf

Oh man, that's perfect. THANK YOU.

Ryno

Composite material, definitely. Do a continuos tiling texture on UV 1, then add masked variations to other portions blending the original texture with a variation or other texture on UV 2.

Joshua Stubbles

if this is meant to be a game scene, I'd suggest building a shader for use in Unreal or some other game engine. Using a composite mat for rendering gets a similar effect, but it's something that most game engines don't support natively.
A potential employer would rather see you do it with dev-spec limitations rather than pie in the sky renders. But in the end, it still shows you know the steps, so it's better than nothing.