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Custom Material size?

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Custom Material size?

Postby Acoustic » Wed Sep 09, 2015 6:03 pm

Can someone explain to me how using custom material in a climate would work in terms of size ratio?

I have a texture map and attribute map that is 1m/pixel. If a material is 200×200 pixel is it resized to fit into that pixel or what? I'm having a difficult time trying to get a custom material made because of this, as I don't know what size and detail would be best.

Also, bump mapping appears to cause a weird tiling effect on my maps with the desert climate, why is that?
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Re: Custom Material size?

Postby Aaron » Mon Sep 14, 2015 2:15 pm

Hi Acoustic,

Thanks for your questions, and sorry for the delay.

I have a texture map and attribute map that is 1m/pixel. If a material is 200×200 pixel is it resized to fit into that pixel or what?


No, a pixel in the texture map only contains one pixel from the material. A pixel in an image can only contain one colour, after all. It depends on how you set up your material's layers, but by default your 200x200 pixel texture image will be tiled across your texture map as repeating 200x200 pixel tiles. With L3DT's default materials, I apply the same texture at multiple resolutions to mask out the repeating features, but the other resolutions are always greater (stretching out to cover more pixels), and never smaller, as down-sampling to cover fewer pixels would only make repeating features more visible.

The trick with materials is to use a texture image that:
  1. doesn't contain very prominent local features that obviously repeat when tiled,
  2. is preferably large (helps with reducing effect of #1), and;
  3. has detail appropriate to the final output texture resolution (i.e. don't have visible blades of grass in a texture image if the size of a pixel in the output texture map is going to be larger than a blade of grass).
If you're interested in super detail, I might recommend you have a quick scan of the rendering grass and highly detailed terrain textures tutorial, as it explains some of the tricks required to get very highly detailed terrain textures.

Also, bump mapping appears to cause a weird tiling effect on my maps with the desert climate, why is that?


Hmmm...not sure. Seems to work OK when I test it (see below), but perhaps I'm using different settings. Could you please post a screenshot of the problem?

DesertTest.jpg


Best regards,
Aaron.
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