Actually you could just make a clone of your tile sampler and make it work with inputs alphas in 8 bit mode. No need to remap anything. Sorry for over -complicating. Also you can use FXAA node to "fix" " nasty edges". That "hiden gradient" UV idea still might be useful if you want to use the leaves color counterparts…
Usually people use shape splatter nowdays . It has a companion data extract node for this. If for some reason you don't want to use shape splatter. It has very limited scale range on narrow textures 256x2048 for example . So sometimes sampler is a better choice. In such case you can use a trick of giving your inputs some…
Wow... that was quite an edit, mate =) I'm afraid your wisdom is lost on me. Fixing node's math, multiplying by extra white - this graph looks like it's written in alien language. Could you share fixed sampler please? I guess there is no harm in using better one even if I don't understand all the benefits. Though, if…
yeah. poopipe is right . those UV gradients or even splatter node are necessary only if you want to use Max (lighter) blending in between scattered things to get kind of proper height blend . ( like in the initial screen) But for leaves it could be just regular alpha blend since they are mostly flat things and laying one…