Terrain texture with blend pattern in alpha

[Josh]

I was wondering if anyone had any textures with a blend pattern in the alpha channel. I want to play around with the blend equation:

http://www.m4x0r.com/blog/2010/05/blending-terrain-textures/

 

Basically this means instead of textures blending like this:

 

It would look more like this:

[knocks]

Add substance support and edit textures like this in real time.

 

Just chuck a high contrast clouds filter into the alpha channel in photoshop.

[YouGroove]

Great idea.

 

Another interesting technique : texture filling in the more black colors of the other texture.

 

Just look at 34:20 on this video

[Josh]

YouGroove, that's exactly what I want to do.

[Rick]

fyi the last presenter in that video was classic!

[YouGroove]

what is fyi?

 

I don't think it's a shader, it's just how is painted the mix of textures.

Like painting snow on rocks in the video :

The snow goes on darker carves of the rocks autotmatically, we could do it by hand using a tiny radisu and painting on darker parts of the rocks.

In that video this is some algorithm that paint for you automatically, it blends textures only on the darker part of the source texture.

We could have that feature , would be great with great possibilities.

[Niosop]

My last terrain shader used RGB for albedo, Alpha for specular, then a separate Alpha8 texture for height. To determine which texture to display it would take splat value * texture height value. There would be some blending at very close values, but mostly it resulted in well defined transitions that looked pretty good. If there's room in the shader then adding a base offset and height multiplier could add some flexibility. Since you have the height you could use it for POM if you wanted as well.

 

An early version of the system is shown here:

 

I believe that BF3 uses a similar system.

[Admin]

Looks good.

[Pancakes]

You mean Texture Splatting?

 

Did you still need some? If so I could try to make one for you sometime tomorrow. But I'm a little bit rusty at the technique, I haven't used it in 4 years! I used to use it in blender 2.4, back before I started using 3dCoat.

[Niosop]

Grab substance player (http://www.allegorithmic.com/products/player), it comes with some free substances and you can pull the height map out of it and use it as the alpha channel. There's some other free substances out there if the ones it comes with aren't good enough, or if you need something special let me know and I'll create some for you.