Terrain Mapping - Please help

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I have recently modeled the terrain that I need for a project, it includes a valley with a slight cliff and a dirt road. Mostly grass, but dirt in several places, including the road. The trouble I'm having is being able to put on and blend multiple textures together. The grass and cliff need to meet each other without overlapping. I don't know how to put something like this together. Currently, I drop a material on it and it covers the whole thing. However, dirt patches, as well as mapping the road would really do wonders for the realism. Do I need to make multiple meshes or find a way to subdivide the current one? I have it as an editable poly right now, any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Kevin M

[Anonymous]

What I would do is make the entire map (grass, road, dirt patches) in Photoshop as one image, and apply it to your mesh using Unwrap UVW.

[Anonymous]

This would be an excellent idea, however, I need the dirt/grass to look decently realistic and I'm not sure how I would do that in photoshop -- clone stamp real pics? also, if the image wraps to the mesh, will the dimensions of the image have to be exactly the dimensions of the mesh, or should they be larger/smaller? I just thought I would have to use tiled textures because the mesh is hundreds of feet =/ (is that already larger than recommended? Though I use max, I've never really modeled an entire site with components, usually use it for modeling small, more specific things :)

[CAMedeck]

Use a Blend material with your grass and dirt materials in the two material slots. Then use a black and white bitmap to "blend" between the two. If you render out your terrain from the Top view at a high resolution, then open that image in Photoshop, you can paint the areas you want as dirt as black and make the rest white (or vice-versa). You can also use greys to blend softly at the edges, or even add small patches of dirt to areas of grass.

[Anonymous]

What I do, is instead of using a multi-sub-object material, I use a Mix material. To create the Mix map, I take a screenshot of the terrain from the Top view, paste it in Photoshop, and color in the area of material B with white. The fewer pixels your Mix map has, the more blurry the boundary will be, no matter how sharp you paint the areas.