ok, take a look at this image (URL below): http://www.theposse.org/mojo-land/ and go down to Pic 2 in the first series. note that this is mojo's stuff not mine, i am only referencing it.
i noted something common in games, which is seamless overlapping of two seperate textures (in this case, muddy road and grassy field). my question is, is this something that is achieved within the game engine, or is a layering process of some sort done in the 3D app? for example, if you had your muddy road texture which was tileable to itself and your grassy field texture which was also tileable to itself, how would one go about stitching them? just create another texture which combined both edges thereby stitching them together? my guess is not because that would seem to create a lot of excessive files.. i also tried using layered textures in maya, but that does not work with hardware render.
thanks alot. i feel dumb asking the question, it's probably an obvious answer.
Most of the graphic cards out there can do alpha blend in realtime. You specify two textures and an alpha texture and card does the blending.
It should happen in the game engine. It also happens in your maya viewport with layered textures since exactly the same process/techonology is in question.
You don't really need a >hardware render<. What you see in the wieport is almost 1:1 preview of how it would look in the game.
i guess that means i am working in the right direction at least. i don't know if it's my card (geforce 5700LE) or just a setting, but when i use layered textures they show up extremely lo-res in the working space. i can go into hardware texturing attribute and change it, but it still doesn't get to the correct rez. i also tried forcing the display resolution in the image's file node but that only goes so far too. i suppose in the end i can just use software render and not worry about it.. it just seems like i am close to getting it to work.
thanks for your help though, it does clarify things. leto
UnrealED (which is what was used to create the picture you mentioned) actually does it in a different way. Rather than having you create a really high res alpha texture that must be mapped to the entire terrain in order to get the proper blending between the two textures, it allows you to Paint the alpha directly into the terrain mesh itself, allowing for really good blending with no texture memory hit.
Speaking of this, I'm trying to do the same thing right in Maya, using a layered texture. However, I cannot find a way to access the interpolated vertex alpha's (vertex colors would do as well) from within the hypershade. There are utilities that let you access other more complicated info (such as normals), but the simpler vertex colors or vertex alpha's doesn't seem to be accessible.
Now, the Bonus Tools for Maya 5 & Maya 6.5 (but not 6.0, grrrrr) have a "hwColorPerVertexShader" plugin and Maya 5 also has a "cvColorShader" plugin, either of which I think could help me out, except that they seem to be missing from Maya 6.0! Does anyone know why its missing? Alternately, does anyone know how I else could access the needed info in the hypershade? I've been trying to get this working for days and I'm getting very frustrated.
Thanks,
Eric
PS. Leto: to view a layered texture at normal resolution, you need to turn on "high quality rendering" and in its options, increase the "color texture resolution" to 1024 if your card can handle it (else just to 512) and click apply.