Tiling textures - what to do if the engine doesn't support vertex blending?

ablaine

Hey guys,

I'm working on some tiling stone floor pieces for a mod project, and as it'll be the first tiling floor texture like this that I've done, I've been reading a lot of threads here on PC and spending a lot of time on the Environment Sculpting wiki page looking at techniques. I really like the way Orb's tiles turned out and I'm hoping to do something similar. Ideally I would like to have a pattern similar to what was used for the floors of the stands of the old Colosseum (feel free to let me know if you have any suggestions about that).

But one problem I've run into while looking at some of those tutorials on the wiki is that the our mod project is using the Dragon Age toolset, which doesn't support vertex blending on textures (as far as I can tell.. there's not a lot of documentation to work off of).

Are there other alternative techniques I could use to produce a similar effect to break up the tiling floor texture with dirt and areas where the tiles have been broken and are partially covered in mud, etc?

I just want to be able to add some visual interest... I have a lot of floor to cover so I don't want to use only the same tiling stone floor texture in all of the stands areas... I'd like to have some large sections where the tiles are mostly intact, but worn with some cracks, some large sections where the stones have been mostly broken up or are covered in mud/gravel, and some small sections where its a mix of the two.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

Bunglo

You could try using decals.

ZacD

You could see if you can user a low rez image to control blending between textures.

Eric Chadwick

You'll need multiple textures then, that tile with each other. You could pack all your variations in a single texture sheet, then divide up your floor geometry in a grid, and UV each square to different squares in the texture sheet.

You can make a square that is half dirt, another that has just a corner as dirt, etc. As long as the dirt-tile transition is in the same location along the side of neighboring squares, it will be seamless.

Google "rts tile", here's the first hit:

Snader

Does the engine support shaders that blend 2 materials with a black and white texture, like a LERP?



If so, go into your 3d package (maya, max, blender) and vertex paint your mesh. Then bake that to a texture (I assume you already have the mesh unwrapped anyway) and use tat as the LERP mask.

Eric Chadwick

Hmm, looks like terrain supports blending.
http://social.bioware.com/wiki/datoolset/index.php/Terrain_mesh

But meshes don't seem to.
http://social.bioware.com/wiki/datoolset/index.php/MAO

Maybe you can use terrain for your tile floors. I've done this before in another engine, it worked well.