3DSMax - Terrain texturing?
polycounter lvl 7
Hey there Polycount! First time poster long time lurker 
in a recent interview with a potential employer it came to light that there was a number of small environment texturing basics in 3DSMax that I was not familiar with.
My portfolio should give you some idea of where I am with 3D, but I never for the life of me understood how to paint terrain textures INSIDE of 3dsmax.
I can do it inside UDK and did so for a recent UDK level project as shown on my folio, but like I say I have no idea where to start when it comes to doing what seems to be a very simple thing in MAX.
I am after something that resembles the below image (not mine.)
Terrain texturing like this and multitexturing is by far my weakest area next to animation in this damn program, so please treat me like a newbie on this one.
in a recent interview with a potential employer it came to light that there was a number of small environment texturing basics in 3DSMax that I was not familiar with.
My portfolio should give you some idea of where I am with 3D, but I never for the life of me understood how to paint terrain textures INSIDE of 3dsmax.
I can do it inside UDK and did so for a recent UDK level project as shown on my folio, but like I say I have no idea where to start when it comes to doing what seems to be a very simple thing in MAX.
I am after something that resembles the below image (not mine.)
Terrain texturing like this and multitexturing is by far my weakest area next to animation in this damn program, so please treat me like a newbie on this one.
Replies
What I'd recommend doing to start, is to make a Composite Map with a few different base textures; dirt, rock, grass, whatever. Make them tile, set them to different UV Channels if you need to... just make them all look good, independently. Next, set each map inside of the Composite to have a Mask of Vertex Paint. Set each map to a different color; Map 1 is Red, Map 2 is Green, etc. Add a vPaint modifier, and paint your terrain mesh to have whatever features you'd like; Fill the Dirt color, then Paint your grass color, etc. Go to town on it.
In the end, you can either bake out the result for one giant texture, or you can paint the channels separately for a large mask (to replace your vpaint colors; you can do fancier things in PS once you have the basic shape painted out), or just leave the vpaint if you're happy with it.
Again, tons of ways to do this... that's just what I've done most recently. GL.
1. First place objects into the scene
2. Scale the objects to exactly the right size
3. Choose a good minimum camera distance to work from
4. Add a huge texture like an 8192
5. Reduce texture size while at minimum camera distance
The final texture size (for baking) before any blurring occours at minimum camera distance will be the largest mip map size you should work with on non-tiling features of the landscape.
*It's important to note that while this is true some of the landscape in games share the same textures on mountains, river beds etc. to save memory.
So overlapping uv's where you can is important for maintaining a decent framerate and pixel quality.
From there on you have to work out resolutions for independent and tiled surfaces seperately so they all share the same level of detail at the same camera distance.
the problem is it's a very max-specific solution that most likely will not translate well to an engine unless they have set up something very specific for their pipeline.
which is something they should probably teach you in any case, or at least have documentation for.
I don't think it is such a big deal, as you have seen from this thread there's a load of different solutions all thrown up at you, none of which will probably be the answer your interviewer was looking for.
so feel free to look into blending textures in 3dsmax but i think the fact you can do terrain painting and setup in source, udk, etc, should be enough to show an employer that you can do it and you can learn a different method of doing it regardless of the package.
i wouldn't get hung up on it, seems like a question i would have just answered with "i can learn anything new, just give me a shove in the right direction
Totally agree. If they ask you "Do you know how a Normal Map works?", there's a "correct' answer to that question. Asking how to texture Terrain means they don't know, and needs someone who does (then go read that stuff, and you'll be fine). Otherwise they'd have asked "Do you know anything about ____ (megatextures, vertexpaint, etc), since that's how we do terrain".
Honestly, I should have used UDK terrain, my mistake really, but I wanted to do the terrain base in MAX.
The problem I had was how tricky it was painting the vert colours without adding too much and I had hoped there was a more elegant and detailed method of displaying texture 1 here Texture 2 here and texture 3 here and if possible 4,5,6, through 20.
Are vert colours limited in the amount you could use? Certainly felt like it if Red channel gives you texture 1, Green Texture 2 and Blue Texture 3, any values in between leading to a blend.
Would Masking alleviate this issue? I have to confess I know nothing of that particular method of texturing :L
ALTERNATIVELY I can abandon this foolish quest and just roll with how I do it in UDK. :U
Blends are ugly, and the biggest problem with Vertex Colors. The easy fix is to add verts on blend areas if there aren't many of them. The better way to do it requires fancy shader math, but is absolutely what you'd want. Read this: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=66952. The basic gist is that you're using one of the tiled textures, in conjunction with vertex colors, to control the shape of your blend. Instead of a smooth transition, you get a sharper transition, and can tweak it to follow the contours of your normal map (say, dirt in the crevices of your rocks, snow on the tops of them, etc).