Blend UV or what is this technique
Hi,
I am starting focusing in 3d Environment and props.
I am now building like dungeon.
but there is something in my mind I see lot of games like ape escape etc...
like blending between 2 object and thats not show a edge seam
how do they do that technique. another example :
....
I am starting focusing in 3d Environment and props.
I am now building like dungeon.
but there is something in my mind I see lot of games like ape escape etc...
like blending between 2 object and thats not show a edge seam
how do they do that technique. another example :
....
Replies
some advice if you have
Basically, just a Color/Diffuse map and that's it with whatever basic shadows system you wish on it.
Another way to do it 'bend' the normals at the intersections. Kinda like this: http://wiki.polycount.com/VertexNormal Basically, take the skirt of the cliff normals and bend them till they look like they belong to the terrain.
Allot of old school games simply have the textures of the walls, include a strip of colour that is similar to the floor. (if you look closely to that screenshot you posted, you can see they did the same.)
Apart from that you could try using vertex colours, and let the vertex colours handle the transparency of the mesh.
but this probably is better used with a fixed camera angle, in FP or 3P view the textures where it is transparent will seem to shift.
http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/34300000/Prince-of-Persia-The-Two-Thrones-screenshot-prince-of-persia-34379015-1280-960.jpg
Around the outer edges on the lower left and lower right, you will see that the wall blends with the floor quite finely. But, this actually is a low-poly curved plane (separate from both the walls and the floor) which seems to blend them together, and this works because the edges of this little long curved plane have a transparency gradient; they slowly fade out over both the floor and the walls. Alternately, if you look at the wall in front, it instead opts to go for the option proposed by bbox, which is to have a dustier texture where they should meet; but the transition can look pretty sharp, and the lighting can differ very much at the edges and corners unless some vertex colours or lightmaps are used.
I've played this game with the lowest settings and no texture smoothing so that I could more easily tell textures apart. Take a look at the window in the front and the window on the right (they are both the same resource from different angles, though). You will notice that they are surrounded by a little bit of grime/mold. This is actually a texture that is a part of the window model, and when the level designer places the windows, he puts the grime as close as possible to the walls so that they almost overlap (without z-fighting) and that the grime is a little bit in front. The grime is of course alpha-mapped so that it blends with the wall nicely, and since it does not cast shadows, it is very hard to tell that it is "in front" at all. This screenshot has smoothed textures, but I've played with no smoothing to see the pixels, and the grime around the windows (and around doors, and the corner detail on doorframes) are all fairly high-rez, while the "bulk" wall texture really is 2x or 4x lesser resolution.
Note that the old PSX games (such as ape escape) could not really do this blending thing because it was computationally expensive for that hardware, but you probably can do it without too much worrying for whatever thing that you are making now.
There are many games that had to deal with this. I never played this game but I watched videos and noticed some tricks that they used.
http://www.abload.de/img/sunshinewater737m.jpg
Notice the blend of grass to the side to the road... If you look between the road and the side, it looks like some blending is used; but the grass and the hill are fairly seamless and may be the same texture. Or alpha channels and blending.
You could try to remember various games where this was done right, and play them or check out some gameplay videos that show it off well when you pause.
Does any of this help?
so, alot of this kind of blending they use vertex color .
so its using like alpha channel and transparent between the edges and put it between the wall and floor right ?
and for mario yeah it seam they use alpha too or like you said nice info
and what I mean in ape escape 2 not the psx.
I watch many videos and the think is when you keep walking everything seamless and you notice another floor or ground with different texture but its like blending.
is this method used the vertex color ?
I kinda getting understanding it really thanks guys.
Take a look at this last screenshot that you sent me. The characters are in the air above the cylindrical platform in the front. It looks to me like it's entirely round, so it makes a good example. Notice in the middle, you can see four markings in the star formation, it looks to me like the texture top meets here, and is tiled four times around the platform. It is very stretched. I think that this was made by taking a regular cylinder (with several height segments), cutting its top and bottom off, and then cylinder-mapping it (texture tiles 4 times at this step). The top two rows of polygons had some grass on top of it, that grass edge thing, one was used to get the slanted edge, and the topmost oned had its edge vrtices grabbed, then collapsed into the middle, which stretched the texture and makes it repeat around the middle vertex. Now look in the back left of the image; you can see that same texture used on a non-circular cliff instead.
Something like this was used; the texture includes the cliff, the grass, and also the transition.
http://www.cgtextures.com/texview.php?id=13538
Alternately if you want to avoid having such a texture, and would prefer to have two normal textures and no edge texture, you could look at these two topics.
http://www.maxforums.org/threads/texturing_smoothing_desert_cliffs/0001.aspx
This one uses an extra chamfer edge where the two textures blend. They use extra map channels.
http://forum.halomaps.org/index.cfm?page=topic&topicID=43555
This one uses an extra texture, and hopes that the edges match each other. Note that at the end of the topic a question is raised regarding relaxing and fitting the edges. The solution is to straighten out the outer edges to fit around the texture properly, then lock them in your UV editor and use 'relax' on all the inner ones. This makes relax work but doesnt upset the edges.
One of those links kinda works like that.
In the one that I linked, it seems that the cliff and the grass connect as being the same texture, and the cliff and the road instead use the other technique and blend by using alpha.
Just my guesses though; I cant look at the source models.