Terrain Texture Blending

Rai

Hey all, I'm trying to find a few older techniques for texture blending models into the terrain.
I've been playing around with HeroEngine and having tons of fun so far, but being fairly new with environmental design I've hit a lot of roadblocks on the best ways to piece together a decent looking environment.

Trying to blend bits like bridges, cliffsides, roads and such to the environment.. So far I'm just going to be painting the terrain to match the model, but there are still problems with visible seams that connect the two, so I guess I can try to fix this with a "skirt" overlapping the two with an alpha to blend them together.

But I'd really like to know if there's anything else to help?
Cheers!

Eric Chadwick

One thing that helped me a lot in the past was to carefully control the texture blending on the terrain to match where it touches the props. Make sure the texture choices for both terrain and props match each other in terms of overall brightness, detail, and hue. It can also really help if you can paint vertex color on the terrain, to add ambient occlusion or bounce lighting kind of effects.

Here's an example, with an older game engine. I tuned the terrain texture and shape to match the wooden bridge. No vertex color. I also added some additional prop rocks to hide some seams. Grass and detail objects can go a long way to help tie things together. http://ericchadwick.com/img/custommap.html