How to paint terrain using few textures?
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Hello,
Does anyone know how to paint terrain correctly?
I have about 10 tileable textures and I assign each texture to terrain face, but the result looks horrible. Is there a way to use masks or something?
Please help.
Replies
We have a lot of tips here.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Landscape
And here too
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/MultiTexture
You can paint the masks in 3ds Max, but it's usually easier to paint them in the game engine.
Check the wiki for tips. I shared some stuff in my Sketchbook too.
Check it out:
In addition to Unreal you might want to look into World Creator or World Machine which is a good way to get some great looking terrain generated really quick and imported into unreal.
I'd recommend Gaia, Vegetation Studio, Microsplat, Complete Terrain Shader, Map Magic, if you prefer to work in the game engine to do this sort of thing.
https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/features/dev-blog-defining-rifts-visual-style
Also a bit here...
https://web.archive.org/web/20140607015052/https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/features/dev-blog-updating-summoners-rift
You already have a mesh, so you just need to decide whether to use a splat map to paint the blending masks, or to use vertex color to paint same.
You need a shader that supports that type of blending. And you need a painting tool.
The mesh you are using isn't set up to do vertex blending, it will need a lot more verts if you're going to paint masks into the vertex color channel(s). You can handle it by UV mapping your terrain and painting explicit masks but then you need worry about the resolution of the masks and how it's UV mapped.
Either way, vertex or explicit textures, if you're doing it in 3dsmax you'll need to use the "composite map/material". It allows you to layer different textures and mask them out. It's kind of a pain in the ass because they are all stacked on top of each other so each higher layer will block the others from showing up and you have to mask out those higher layers. It's a pretty tedious process in 3dsmax, but is handled much better in Unreal or Unity.
Usually the terrain is subdivided and tessellates based on camera/player proximity, this helps with performance, it also usually manages height maps. The level of tessellation gives you enough verts to paint those masks into the vertex color channels and create soft or hard gradients that aren't dependent on textures.
So the mesh you have won't let you use the most common method of blending, not enough verts. Personally, it would be faster to recreate what you have in an actual terrain system because so many of those tools just aren't in 3dsmax and it's going to take 10x longer and be way more labor intensive.