I've been watching my daughter play World of Warcraft. I am extremely impressed by the low poly landscape that seems to go for miles in the game. There seems to be three or more textures on a surface at a time. They are using some kind of alpha blending to make the road texture blend with the grass on the sides. Sometimes dirt or rock patches will stick up from a hillside. I am familiar with texture programs like UVMapper that create one map for the entire surface. With it you would have a mile of texture for a mile of terrain. WoW textures are small compared to the terrains. They are tiling and the repeating texture is visible as you travel. It looks like these were just airbrushed onto the larger surface with UV Coordinates. What kind of program creates this tiling alpha texture and what is the technique called?

isn't that just planar mapping?

It's part of the rendering engine and the program itself that is used to create the levels.

It's probably called "alpha tiling", lol. I'm not for sure myself.

A lot of games come with "editors" in which you create your own levels. The editors included with the Unreal games are pefectly capable of editing together a level comparable with what the company makes.

In Bryce, I have made 3 terrains, with 3 seperate DTE mats. And, the terrains could be driven with 3 seperate alpha maps, giving them areas of visibility. It was not an exact science at all, it took experimenting and luck, but the end result has the ability to look really cool. It would just take some practice to get there.

AgentSmith

I can only find this example that uses image textures. (water, grass & rock)

Forgive the crudeness of the scene, it's 3 years old, but here is a Bryce example of using 3 stacked terrains together with alphas to blend from one texture AND one terrain to the other.

Using 3 seperate terrains, still allows one to FULLY be able to edit the texture that is on each terrain.

AS

This is what I've been able to do so far, Tiling a single texture. I started with a bryce terrain generated with the rolling hills fractal. I exported this as an obj file and textured wirth a grass image from 3dcafe.

I took the object file into UVMapper and put a medium sized checker image behind the map. I scaled the map and clipped it by selecting a square's worth of polys. I dragged these to the top left corner and stacked them on top of each other.

When I got the map cut up and stacked I pulled it to the center and rescaled it to fill the map space then I saved the new object.

The new terrain tiles the same grass image 64 times.

My problem is how to get three or more textures onto a single mesh. I'm trying to minimize mesh and texture sizes so three terrains is not an option. I can use two textures such as grass and gravel. I can create another texture like an alpha mask to draw roads across the surface. This will work the same as using a grayscale in the B channel to control the A and C blending in bryce. I'm just wondering if anyone has used a program like deep paint that might do this on the fly with tools like an airbrush.

bookmark

Hmm, I'm curious but why would you need more than one texture on an object for a low-poly situation? If you were doing multipass rendering such as Unreal 3-esqu, you'd have a color map, an ambient map, a specular map, a bump map, and a displacement map, but Unreal (for example) is very far from low-poly work such as WoW sports. Are you trying to do this in Bryce, or in WoW? If your question is Brycean, are you using the Material Lab to mix the texture together? If you have access to Photoshop or PSP, you can blend any number of textures together any way you like using layers and such. One cool thing about Bryce's exporter (the only cool thing?) is that it WILL export all your maps separately. So you could export these maps and then bring them into post-production for making changes, then re-import the map back into Bryce as an image texture...

Attached Link: grass/hair for realtime gaming.

WoW does the blending using an in-game algorythm(sp?), but the effect is greatly enhanced by way of grass sprites(a polygon that is textured like grass or smoke...whatever).The game can also display stuff depending on the distance to the camera, as well as radomly generating the immediate surrounding objects(like grass,stones,ect) all on the fly. All the cool techniques I've learned from lowpoly art has been good for my high poly stuff too.I say keep doing stuff like this electroglyph, its fun stuff.

plus there is this technique....uh, the link at the top.

Message edited on: 03/07/2006 01:48

be aware, the game engines are making alot of what you see possible as well.

Thanks a lot TwistedBolt! A lot of good information here and links to others. I'm using Bryce because it has the ability to do object masks and heightfields. Not to mention a great terain modeler and scatter tools to spread around those grass sprites you mentioned. I'm trying to do dds textures which are basically compressed png files with some other things added such as the distance blur you see in WoW. You can check out a lot of game texture tools at http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html

Bryce will do fine as the renderer. If all the models are done like a videogame, then it will render fast as well.I've been doing alot of lowpoly plants on and off for the past year now as well, and it real fun to make cool little scenes in bryce with them.