Advise for working with 32-bit PNGs

[hunterkiller]

Hi. I just bought L3DT pro and I love it. I have a splatter up and running and all is more or less well, however I have come to focus on the aesthetics of the alpha maps.

It seems that the alpha maps are more masks - being at either 1 or 0 for each channel. This ends up looking splotchy in the splatting when no blending between textures occurs.

I'd love to be able to generate a 4x alpha map and scale it back down, however I am having trouble finding a program that handles 32-bit PNGs correctly.

Does anyone have advise on what I can do to get fractional transitions between texture layers? Any tools for handling 32-bit PNGs? Or better yet can I make a feature request that does more robust smoothing rather than masking? I don't know if this is doable, but basically I do:

Code: Select all

float4 splat(float2 uvColor, float2 uvBlend)
{
   float4 a = tex2D(alpha, uvBlend);
   float4 c = lerp(tex2D(color0, uvColor), tex2D(color1, uvColor), a.r);
   c = lerp(c, tex2D(color2, uvColor), a.g);
   c = lerp(c, tex2D(color3, uvColor), a.b);
   c = lerp(c, tex2D(color4, uvColor), a.a);
   return c;
}

Please advise! Thanks!

[hunterkiller]

nevermind! Paint.net from the tutorial section/suggested SW works like a treat!

[Aaron]

Hi HunterKiller,

It seems that the alpha maps are more masks - being at either 1 or 0 for each channel. This ends up looking splotchy in the splatting when no blending between textures occurs.

That's the current implementation, yes, but it's fairly high on my to-do list to generate non-binary alpha maps. I've put this off for a while because the calc would in all likelihood be infuriatingly slow, and would probably require some sort of multi-processor/core support to be acceptable (I'm currently working on this.) Also, this would require a few more additions to the climate system, which aren't a problem for me, but may be a bit much for the climate-developers still reeling from the many and varied changes introduced to the climate system in version 2.4.

Okay, enough excuses. I'll put this on the to-do list for v2.5.

Thanks for the feature request.

Cheers,
Aaron.