Good evening all! I'm looking (as the post title suggests) in to ways to texture a terrain... Specifically, overlaying textures over textuers (e.g. roads), and blending textures together (E.g. mud / grass overlapping). I've yet to discover any substantial resources on the topic! I've been checking the SDK docs of HL2 and similar to see how they achieve the effect. For the road style overlays, I can only guess that the texture is being drawn using new polygons that 'hover' above the original terrain (by a tiny margin to prevent rounding errors). I haven't made my mind up about the blending... more importantly, about how the textures fade in to one another on the edges - I.E. taking a river bank for my example, it is common to see mud closest to the river, which slowly fades in to grass further up the bank. May I have your thoughts (answers?) on the matter? :D Thanks, Dachande

Real roads are actually several centimeters thick, so you might consider rendering the road above the ground and render additional quads to the sides to close the gap between the road and the ground.

I'm not going to be much help, but its a topic I'm quite keen to listen into. I've thought about a couple of ways you could do this, never really got round to implementing any of them though.

My favourite idea is to have a tile system (grass tile, mud tile etc), and you can start by just having a single texture layed terrain using this tiling system. Then you could have a blending layer (or layers) for blending different tile types together. I guess this could be done using a clever algorithm, or in some kinda of tool, although I'm a big fan of the clever algorithm idea. Each tile would look around it to see if there are any tiles of a different type, if so then it would place another layer ontop of itself with varying alphas between the two tile types (so it goes from 0.5f to 0.0f, as the other tile will also blend the other way). This is prehaps a standard method, its the one that screams out sensible in my mind :-) Now all i gotta do is find the time to implement it ;-)



Cheers,
Richard.

look at the latest articles on gamedev. i thought there were a couple that handle terrain texturing

greets

Quote:Original post by codehunter13
look at the latest articles on gamedev. i thought there were a couple that handle terrain texturing

Links
Texturing Heightmaps
Adding Realistic Rivers to Random Terrain (not exactly what you're asking for, but an interesting read)