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How to Manually Make Terrain Tiles Disappear
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Shatterstar Offline
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Post: #1
How to Manually Make Terrain Tiles Disappear
This is a Tutorial for 1.0 but I am sure that these techniques could be applied to 2.0 Do you see that grassy hill in the background with no tiling effects? that only took a few seconds of my time to make, and I'm going to show you how to make it happen. First, cover your whole ground in a ground Material/Texture called, 'Just_Add_Bison' Once you have done that, open up your Material Editor by clicking 1 box number one and finding it in the list below, or clicking box number 5. Inside your Material Editor, you are going to want to drag and drop a grass texture of your own. Before you save it, there are a few things that you will want to do. First, you want the occlusion culling turned on. Make sure the texture you dragged in there is seamless. You also want to make sure your texture is boring, meaning there are no variations in colors. Notice how the grass is all one color, and very plain, no flowers or any patterns that could catch the eye. That is what I mean by boring. Now, you will want this texture to be a little off set in color in comparison to the Just Add Bison texture. Make sure you tweek the texture to be either slightly darker or slightly lighter in shade. Now that you have done that, save it, and set it inside your material brush box, that would be number 5. you will know which brush you are using by the box being highlighted red. Now that you have done all of that, its time to decide what kind of brush you want to use. Just below brush number 4 is your Brush Parameters Box. You will want to set your brush to a slow speed and extremely soft. Time to find an image. Inside your Brush Parameters box, click the image button. This will bring up your image. the is box number 4. Find a height-map image, or an image with a lot of random black and white blotches. drag and drop the image in, or double click the empty box to load an image. Once the image is loaded in, You are ready to Paint! Happy Painting those tiles away! lol


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06-05-2013 12:22 AM
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Pixel Perfect Offline
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Post: #2
RE: How to Manually Make Terrain Tiles Disappear
Interesting, but how does that altered terrain texture now look if you walk up to it?

If I understand correctly what you are doing you appear to be masking out the variations in the base texture by blending a more uniform texture over the top with a randomised pattern but would appear to be a permanent alteration, not one affected by distance. I'd imagine a good technique for distant non walkable areas though!

The Macro texture kind of allows for this type of effect, but only affecting terrain at a distance, which I find a nice feature (just would prefer control over the distance setting).
06-05-2013 07:34 PM
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Shatterstar Offline
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Post: #3
RE: How to Manually Make Terrain Tiles Disappear
I actually like your way better...lol. I was just showing an easy way to mask the patterns for people that have no experience in Level Designing.

by the way...In that picture above...the game engine's ambient occlusion is turned off. Those are textures that have ambient occlusion maps. grin
(This post was last modified: 06-05-2013 08:54 PM by Shatterstar.)
06-05-2013 08:47 PM
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Pixel Perfect Offline
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Post: #4
RE: How to Manually Make Terrain Tiles Disappear
Well your's is as valid a technique as any other. Always good to have more strings to our bows smile

I'm intrigued by your comment regarding the textures having ambient occlusion maps though! How does that work with terrain textures designed to be tiled across a landscape as I thought AO was a static shadow effect baked into the texture; not a real time one? Or were you referring to the textures on the buildings?
06-05-2013 09:54 PM
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Shatterstar Offline
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Post: #5
RE: How to Manually Make Terrain Tiles Disappear
textures on the buildings. smile Esenthel has a built in Ambient Occlusion generator. You can turn it on or off. when it is on, it will try to do it for you in real time, (or as close as it can get in real-time) I made baked AO on my house models to help out. And if someone is playing my game with AO turned off, My textures will still hold up, and the game will still look good.
(This post was last modified: 06-06-2013 04:43 AM by Shatterstar.)
06-06-2013 04:41 AM
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Tottel Offline
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Post: #6
RE: How to Manually Make Terrain Tiles Disappear
Yeah, it's a good idea to bake AO in your diffuse (Just a layer on "multiply" in photoshop). It adds a lot of depth to the model.
06-06-2013 08:35 AM
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gdalex Offline
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Post: #7
RE: How to Manually Make Terrain Tiles Disappear
I'll try that soon, thanks Shatterstar smile
06-06-2013 10:01 AM
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Shatterstar Offline
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Post: #8
RE: How to Manually Make Terrain Tiles Disappear
(06-06-2013 08:35 AM)Tottel Wrote:  Yeah, it's a good idea to bake AO in your diffuse (Just a layer on "multiply" in photoshop). It adds a lot of depth to the model.

That's exactly how I do it Tottel. smile
06-06-2013 07:45 PM
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