Flagstones Vertex Blended Texture

tharle

about time i posted some more actual work on here.

spent most of today zbrushing up some flagstones to make clean and damaged floor textures - gonna add some more colour variation and make some mud and sand textures tomorrow and hopefully create a nice shader in UDK that allows you to paint between them all using vertex colours.

tharle

right, 4 textures blending using 3 colour channels. - everything is based off the height map and adapts according to what's painted. red controls the height of the flagstones, green the damage on the stone and blue the height of the sand. i might make a couple of colour variations for the mud and sand and plug that into the green too if i get time.

about 90 instructions and 9 textures so not cheap but not too expensive either.

Envart

Nice work, I need to get into this myself! My only crit would be the sand could use some falloff.

passerby

make a paitanble falloff for the sand for the alpha channel of the vert paint.

Stromberg90

I think the tiling of the sand seams to much.

tharle

right, basically rebuilt the material from the ground up - rather than using if nodes to compare vertex colours to height maps, now i'm just using vertex colours as the alphas in lerps with a component of the height map in the vertex colours. also added the alpha channel to control the amount of influence the height map has, which in tern controls the falloff of the sand over the stone.

Avanthera

Looking much better, you may want to try to focus on achieving a separation between a more crisp, rough stone, and the soft flow-y sand. Right now the stones are all smoothed out, lowers the visual contrasting shapes.

Also: Your stones look like they don't have a spec map, or a very low intensity one. I'd up the spec on the stones a little and maybe add a slight bit more to the sand to make it read better.

Keep it up

salacious_Crumb

Looks good! Could you post an image of your material? The important stuff. I would like to see how you put this together.

tharle

latest update - changed the sand material for one that i think works better with the effect. also tweaked the spec maps and changed the lighting.

i've also added in dx11 tessellation and worlddisplacement and worldpositionoffset so that the mesh moves up and down as you paint the materials in. almost certainly way too expensive for a game but nice to see what you can do with the tech if you push it.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20053647/Vertex_Painted_Flagstones.rar

is my package if you want to open it up in udk and take it apart. the material is a bit of a mess but shouldnt be too hard to understand.

any questions give me a shout.

edit: also i think i might just turn this into a WIP thread - anyone know if i can change the title of the first post? cheers

Computron

I was under the impression that you could not do any complex operations like blending on your inputs for dx11 tessellation, is this still the case or can you blend your height maps now?

Also, how do tessellated meshes handle vertex color?

tharle

well blending the inputs usings vertex colours lerps etc before they plug into the deformation node worked for me so it seems to be working in the latest build - i can only assume that any verts created by the dx11 tessellation assume the colour of the verts surrounding it so that the mesh deforms as you'd expect. i never saw any errors anyway.