Keeping textures from warping over large, uneven surfaces

[Meowx]

Been working some more on terrain texturing today, trying numerous techniques and still coming up pretty blah.

 

 

You can't really see much here since it's a low-res preview, but there's not much to see. Just giving you an idea of a section of ground I'm working on. Basically a large grid pushed and pulled into terrain shapes.

 

Now, how do I go about texturing this properly? I can't figure out a good flattening technique; endless decals-on-decals to patch stretched looking sides are starting to look pretty lame, porjection mapping a material doesn't seem to be going anywhere useful... suggestions? Thanks a ton!

[robcat2075]

If painting it to look good from teh angle you want to see it from is no on the table, procedural materials may be a good tool.

 

The basic strategy is to use gradient combiners and nested turb combiners to give different treatments to different elevations. Great results will not be easy.

 

Photoman made some terrain materials:

 

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=34162&hl

 

 

I did a thread with some displacement terrains a while back.

flyover

[HomeSlice]

Another option is to make a large image in a paint app that is a black grid on a white background.

Apply this to your entire mesh. A single stamp.

Right-click on the stamp and choose Edit.

Now you should have the Model window open and the UV window open for the stamp. Just the two windows.

Hit [Alt-v] to tile the windows vertically or [Alt-h] to tile them horizontally.

Move the CPs in the stamp's UV edit window and watch the grid in the model window.

When all the parts of the grid decal look square in the Model window, you know your painted texture will not warp anywhere.

Create a new image with the same proportions as the grid decal. It doesn't have to be the same size, but it must have the same width/height ratio.

Paint your landscape texture and save the image as TGA.

Import into A:M and replace the Grid image with the new painted image.

[Meowx]

Cool ideas, guys! Thanks!

 

edit: trying Homeslice's idea with the grid, it's working quite well.

[Meowx]

Ack! Now, after adjusting the points of the stamps, I'm getting MASSIVE texture distortion when rendering! I've seen this before on 5-points, but never 4-points!

 

It looks fine in real-time:

 

But when I do a trial render, it spits out a stomach-churning mess:

 

Render to file doesn't fare much better:

[pixelplucker]

You'll end up with some stretching if you apply a map and don't have the option to average out the uv's. Best bet is to use procedrals then bake them into an image map and do any tweaking in 3d Paint.

 

You may also have some luck with bitmap plus since that takes an image and maps it like a procedral. This will give you the option of using seamless tiled textures as a base.

 

I have used the dark trees and had good results.

 

Shift right click on the bake option should bring up the dialog to change the resolution.

[HomeSlice]

That's kind of strange that there would be such a difference. Its too bad, since that procedure is generally the most versatile in terms of allowing you to use any paint program to paint your textures exactly how you want them.

 

Using procedurals isn't much more work, especially if you aren't too picky about where the different textures start and end, and you can usually get closer to the surface without seeing artifacts.

Like Robcat said:

Start with a gradient combiner.

Make the two attribute colors different, like red and green.

Apply the material to your mesh

Adjust the gradient Start and End values until the transition between the two color is in the right place.

If you want more transition than two, convert one or both Attributes to gradient combiners and repeat the process.

When all the transitions are where you want them, start converting gradient attributes to turbulence combiners.

And keep converting Attributes on the various combiners to different turbulences or gradients until you have the amount of detail you want.

 

The only issue I have with baking procedural textures is that you cannot really edit them in a plain old paint app like Painter or Photoshop, you pretty much need 3d Paint. 3d Paint is a great program, I'm not knocking it.

 

As a test, maybe try applying your image decal as a Bitmap Plus material? Who knows, that might end up looking just fine..

[mtpeak2]

I use gradient materials with the attributes set to bitmap plus. You can also set the attributes to turb combiners and have their attributes set to bitmap plus. It works pretty well.

 

You could also use multiple stamps and texture sections at a time.

[Meowx]

Drat. Guess I'll be making a big tile and using bitmap plus. There's no way to fix this? Is this a... (known) bug? I mean, it shows up perfectly fine in real-time view.

[mtpeak2]

Make sure your realtime is as high as it goes.