Hello!

I am looking for a good way to make good texturing for large single objects in Poser, such as landscapes or houses on cliffs. Just making a single UV map doesn't cut it because the resolution will be too low, even with an 8k texture, if the scene is large, and just tiling the whole object, alone or in zones won't do it either because it will either look repetitive, or it will have harsh seams.

I have looked for solutions, for example using vertex colors like in UE4, but I can't find any information on if this is possible in Poser's material room or not.

If vertex colors is not possible, is it possible in some other way to blend textures on the same material, say with tiling textures and then use mask textures on the UV map to somehow blend between them?

Any information on this or pointers on where I could go to find out about it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

One technique worth using at times is fractal mixing a tiling image with a rotated version of itself.

http://forum.runtimedna.com/showthread.php?92401-(Pseudo)-Random-Tiling-for-Image-Maps

Hmm, that is interesting. So in theory I could combine any textures with that method, and use pretty much anything as a mask for it?

Well - taking your question literally, no, not just anything. You can combine anything but it may not look like what you want. For example, mixing two brick textures will still look like repeating bricks and they would not necessarily blend well. But qualifying with "suitable" textures and "suitable" masks, yes - there is a lot you can do to make the repetitions less obvious.

So it does seem I can do it. I am not so interested in "random" blends though, but a more organized one. I'd like to paint a black and white texture on the UV map, and keep it at the original scale, using it to separate the two textures. (Like a trail cutting through a landscape mesh) It looks doable. In your example though, either the black/white connections of the cloud node would be used, or a blender. Is it the blender I need to use, if I use a black and white image map?

I am also wondering if it would be possible to blend more than two images in a material. Seems I am going to delve deep into the world of Poser materials...

Oh - I get you now. Yes, regardless of goal or effect, you can blend two images with a mask to, for example, choose between grass and dirt, or dirt and stones, etc.

You can also blend entire shaders - so that some is dirt and some is water (a completely different shader effect).

The Blender node's job is to take any pair of inputs and produce one or the other or a mix of both. The fact that a mix can be 100% + 0% or 0% + 100% or 50% + 50% of the two inputs is why it is so versatile.

If you connect a black-and-white map to the Blender's blending input, set to 1, then the black exactly chooses the first input and the white exactly chooses the second input.

Read this thread:

http://forum.runtimedna.com/showthread.php?31709-Dual-Materials-with-Stencils

This looks very feasible and simple. I will try with this and see how it goes! If successful, I'll post some results here with renders and screenshots of material settings for benefit of the community. You rock as usual, thanks!

Great links and info, BB! I'm working on some landscapes right now and this'll be very helpful.