making terrain textures

I am currently using photoshop, but if someone could point me in the right direction on how to make terrain textures like this...



that would be great. My major problem is how do you make the grass and dirt all on one texture... can you use the paint tool to actually paint a texture on, instead of just a color?

He probably took the grass texture then the sand texture,put it in photoshop, cut it out, some opacity changes, blurs and smudges in order to get the grass look like it mixes in and there you have it.

Heard of layers? I don't know if Photoshop supports layers (never used or really seen it), but it involves using two textures. The dirt texture is one, a lower layer (grass sticks up higher and closer objects are the first seen objects), and the grass layer, the higher layer, is used on top. The best I can come up with is to make use of transparency and partially erase the grass texture layer for fading, fully erase it for dirt only, and leave it as is for grass only. If that doesn't work, I've got other tricks and shortcuts. One of which is to create a temporary, special layer with shades of gray to use as alpha, smooth it out when done, convert the shades of gray to the equivelent alpha (color to alpha with black as the color (in GIMP)), then use alpha to selection, and erase everything at full blast as needed. If that doesn't work, there's likely at least another way or two of doing so.

there are a ton of possibilities. The most native one is to create a blend map:


white is 100% and black is opaque. You can add selections or random filters to this blend map (be sure to only paint onto the blendmap! open channels and deselect everything but the blend map then paint onto it)

the biggest benefit of working with layers and maps is to be able to exchange and redo or change things with a few clicks.

I tend to use Paintshop Pro for my texture work. I'd use the sand color as the background, then use the airbrush tool and airbrush the grass textures on using a low opacity setting. It's very easy to select a texture (as opposed to a color) for the airbrush tool in Paintshop Pro.

The previous suggestions are great too!
- Bret

Post deleted by Trev101524

This is my first try, using to the best of my ability, what ulillillia suggested...



for some reason, something dosent seem right, but its a lot closer than i was befor.

Could you post the two textures that you're using? Maybe I can throw together a mini-tutorial for ya (using Paintshop Pro -- but maybe you can do similar stuff with Photoshop).

Like blattsalat said, there's a ton of ways to make something like that. But...my question is, do you want the texture to look like that, or the map to look like that?

You can make the texture in photoshop using a couple layers and the blur and smudge tools.

If you want your terrain to look like that, you can set up a blend material (I'm talking MAX here) with the grass texture and sand texture and make a blend map for it (w/ photoshop).

only thing i would recommend strongly: use layers and states instead of deleting or merging stuff.
This way later on you can exchange for example the grass with another texture with one click. If eveything is merged down to one layer or ereased and smudged redoing this can get quite tricky.

a simple terrain with layers made in 5 minutes and exchangeable from bottom to top and vica verse:

wow, I could never do that in 5 minutes. But that is what i am working twoards. At this point, it is trial an error with all the different photoshop techniques and effects .

@ clone45

Sorry if it seemed like I ignored your offer, but i accidently deleted the textuers I was using, so i had to remake them, I will upload them as soon as I finish them.

This is kind of related so I didnt want to start a new thread-does anyone know how to go the next stage and add a seperate detail map to each texture on the trrain skins- (grassmap + grassdetail, stone map + stonedetail on same terrain)Ive just started using the MultiTerrain.wdl from 6.40 and its great but I cant seem to work out how to allocate a specific detail to a specific skinmap-have tried the "shared texture" option in the skin editor in MED and played around with the order and settings in the skin properties window in WED but not having much luck.

Thanks