Multilayer terrain painting

# 1 31-03-2008 , 12:10 PM

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Join Date: Mar 2008

Posts: 2

Hello all!

This is my first post here at SimplyMaya, but I've been using Maya for a while in various classes at my college.

I'm having difficulty attacking a problem: I need to make a desert scene in Maya. I have built the terrain and now need to texture it. I'm familiar with UnrealED's terrain layer painting concept and really like how you can set a base texture layer then paint on top of that with a second layer, then add a third layer. I need to do sand around the edges where the land hits the water, and dirty rock for the desert, as well as a few patches of another rock type, to vary it up.

How can I achieve this in maya? I know I can make one big texture and apply it directly to the terrain but close up, it will be very low quality. This is for an animation where I need it to look good up close as well as from far away. Can you do good layer painting in Maya? Can you even apply two textures to one mesh on top of eachother with varying alpha textures? I've never done this before, surprisingly.

Any tips would be appreciated, and I tried to figure out the Layered Shader but didnt know how to get it to work properly. Any verbatim steps to get what i need going would be super-awesome.

Thanks in advance and looks like this is a wonderful community for Maya enthusiasts (and frustrated users user added image

) Bye!

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# 2 31-03-2008 , 07:18 PM

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Join Date: May 2003

Location: London

Posts: 1,001

if you want to get layering to work. Then just use the layered texture and paint the alpha channel with another texture.
(look in help files)

UV snapshot out your terrain mesh and paint alphas for where you want your different elements to show up.

A quick fix to do this is for example if you want different textures applied based on the hight of the geometry, to do this you can use the snow 3D texture to drive the alphas. To get a higher resolution you either just paint your maps higher resolution or you can tile your textures using the place 2d node attached to your procedural or file node.

How that makes sense, if you need a more detailed overview, ask.

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# 3 01-04-2008 , 01:57 AM

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Join Date: Mar 2008

Posts: 2

Okay so I've got a layered shader with both my dirt and my sand texture in it. I have done the dirt first, and the sand second, so that means I need to add my alpha layer to the topmost (dirt). I have created a clouds-like alpha map and applied it to the dirt texture. The problem is, I have this new layered shader applied to my huge terrain and repeated over and over, many times. The whole purpose of this was to get it so that I can have the alpha map stretch over the WHOLE terrain, giving big spots of dirt and big spots of sand, which would lessen the appearance of a repeating texture over and over.

How do I map the alpha to the whole width and length of my terrain, but then separately set the tiling properties of my textures?

-Alex

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# 4 01-04-2008 , 08:41 AM

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Join Date: May 2003

Location: London

Posts: 1,001

Use the Layer Texture not shader, the snow texture is a procedural i do not mean a snow like texture.
You can find it under 3D textures, it will apply itself based on terrain, either use this or snapshot the UVs of the terrain (UV editor > snapshot) and paint the alpha map yourself.

Or paint directly on the surface (paint the map on color for ease then assign the file texture created to the relevant alpha channel of your layer node instead) you can also do a combination of the two by layering a snow procedural and a hand painted alpha togeather (can be done with math or layer nodes or by mapping one to the others color balance settings, see documentation).

If repition is the problem , as i said look into changing settings in the 2d or 3d placement nodes linked to the textures you are using. If you want to get a less artificial look you could bring your alpha or your texture map into photoshop and tile it a few times then place a layer above your new tile set and set the layer to multiply, overlay etc and brush somes values into the layers to give you some higher resolution variations on a bigger tile.

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Multilayer terrain painting

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