Creating Splatmaps

Hello there,

after diving deeper into World Machine for the last weeks, finally our engine has the most basic features implemented. One of them is terrain texture splatting - 8 textures in one pass using two RGBA textures. Each channel represents one of the splat textures.

I was surprised not to find anything in the forums on splatting. Anyone has any experience with generation splatmaps in WorldMachine and exporting them to 4-channel (RGBA) textures?

Thanks for any input!

What exactly is a splat map? Is that just a random pattern? If so: start with a perlin noise generator.

You can combine several maps into one RGB map using the channel combiner from the converter tab. The bitmap output device has a port for an alpha map.

splatting is explained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_splatting

only today did I find time to experiment with the splats and everything turned out to be very simple with world machine. I now filter by height/slope/etc and join into RGB, then add a fourth map into the bitmap exporter alpha. this I do twice, getting 8 different floor textures stored in 2 RGBA png files.

this way I can easily pre-splat my terrain in wm2 and hand-paint the finer details in the game itself.

thanks for the reply nikita