This is my first post. I hope I don’t mess things up or ask anything stupid I’m not sure if I picked the right title for this post. I thought it was as descriptive as possible.
I’ve been looking into WM for 2 weeks now and it is really mind blowing. My goal is to have a terrain with 12 textures. So far I’ve been depending on splatmaps to do the texturing, so this will require exactly 3 splatmaps.
My question is this: Can I set an area as desert with Layout and other areas as other things, and have splatmaps make a smooth transition from one area to another?
Just to expand on this thought I’m using Unity3D to create a world map. I’ve completed the workflow from WM to Unity3D, and by selecting height and slopes I can create a detailed splatmap. But the world is too simple with only 4 textures in it, so I want to create coasts, jungles, deserts, mountains, steppes etc. An example of having 12 textures will result in this kind of splatmaps:
There’s several ways to do this, depending on what you exactly want, but in the simplest case:
Figure out how you want to combine height, slope, noise, erosion data, etc to distribute your coverages. For each of your 12 textures, you will need a single mask that shows how strong it is at each location.
Once you have these, create a Splat Converter device and open it up. Set the number of inputs to 12, and then connect each of your masks to one of the inputs. The Splat converter will make sure that they obey all the usual rules (the weights must sum to 1 at each location, etc).
The final step is to produce your RGBA files that Unity wants to see. To quote from the workflowguide below,
To convert your individual maps into a bitmap, wire them into a Channel Converter, which will produce an RGB image for the first three channels. The fourth will be used as the Alpha channel of the bitmap. Wire the resulting maps into one or more bitmap output devices to create a 4 channel splatmap. If you are using more than 4 textures, simply create multiple bitmap outputs and adjust the Splat Converter accordingly.
Feel free to follow up if you still have questions…
I’m not sure if I picked the right title for this post. I thought it was as descriptive as possible.
Splat 1: 
Splat 2: 
Splat 3: 