For LMs you want at least a padding of 2-4. It's not that they'll be overlapping but bleeding across islands(the same way a texture bleeds when it mips) Having the mesh as multiple unwelded elements is fine. Could you upload the mesh in .fbx so I can have a mess with it?
Looking good! One comment: The rocky part where the tracks meet the sand and the rocks under the tracks look a little to different and dont blend to well. Maybe try matching the colors a bit more and finding a blend solution between the two?
I don't think mentalcore can be considered as training wheels lol. In the case of Golem from LOTR isn't that a case of using a blend material? Doesn't vray have a blend material too allowing you to use multiple materials and their attributes?
I love lamp. ShaderFx does some texture blending in the viewport works great, its free to individuals too. Vassago tossed a shader together that blended a few materials together I think it also worked in the viewport as a directX material.
Tonight I worked on the ground texture, blending the centre rock into the grass and adding in the blue reflections. Also added some slight colour variations to the other rocks. A bit more blending to do before I can call this one done.
This is easy to do, but it performs poorly and is not useful for most commercial games. When you have multiple materials and then blend/lerp between them, the GPU does a complete calculation of each material and then blends between them. That's a lot of wasted GPU time.
Being mostly soft is part of what's causing those shading errors; it's trying to blend between faces that can't be blended smoothly. Making some edges hard (above say 60 degrees sharp) will help lessen some of those issues. But those long thin triangles are never going to look great, probably; to get the best results,…
Nothing in that vid is so radically different than using the weight tool in Max. Select torso verts, full weight them to the spine, select leg verts, full weight to leg. Select the verts inbetween where you want to blend the influence between them. Press blend.
@3DKyle thanks , I'm more looking to replicate another kind of serpentine, this: will need a lot more work. I created a mask to blend the two kind of marble : now I only need to figure out a way to blend it in a realistic way. I would be grateful for advice on that and feedback .