Need help to make better Splat Maps for Unity

Bug Reports
#1

Hi I have the beginnings of a continent that I am quite please with in WM. I am now experimenting with 8 Channel Splats which I am importing into Unity with Tom’s terrains tools. I have attached an example of the .tmd and 2 grabbed pictures from Unity.
The problem is no matter what I do

a)If you look at the WM file I get horrible horizontal bands across my landscape rather than a smoother blend
b) I am not getting the blend between the landscape, the mix between rock and grass for example I wanted rock colours jutting through the grass etc.
c) I feel I am not making the most of the channels. (Some colours just aren’t coming through)

Basically I have done OK with 4 channels but the “rock channel” for instance is quite tiled and needs to be broken up with a second splat over the top here and there with another rock channel. (or that is my hope anyway!) If you look at the images in the attached folder (These are both the same 2 splats attached in a different order in Unity) they look horribly tiled -Which can be tweaked manually with a brush in Unity but would be great to get a better spread first. They also look very washed out, almost like the pngs I have outputted as splats are very faint. Any help would be much appreciated or anyone who can point me to a good tutorial or macro that might help would be great!

#2

Hi there,

Lots of questions… I’ll see what we can tackle right away.

You’ve put together a nice looking world there. However, 8 channel and above splatmaps can indeed get unwieldy if you don’t have a plan of attack for using each of the channels and a way to validate if its doing what you want or not. Here’s my recommendation:

  1. Take your two overview chains that creating your overlay previews and merge them – put the output of the first into the base of the second, so that you have a single overlay view with all splat channels on it. Assign each channel a unique color in the color generator(s). You will now be able to better judge your distribution, and make sure you’re actually using each layer effectively.

  2. Have a logical way to reason about what you want to achieve. For example, a couple rock layers to break up the tiling makes tons of sense – make their colors similar so you can easily judge the variations, name the last device in each chain so you can remember what it does, and put them next to each other in the splat converter inputs.

So for example, if you want to have a breakup layer for your rock layer, I would have the base rock layer use whatever mask you are using to decide what’s rock, and have the breakup layer use the same mask except slightly modified. For example, put it as a mask into an advanced perlin noise device, or add/subtract a small amount of one of WM’s erosion outputs from it. Alternatively, there’s a simple macro shipped with WM called “mask breakup” that is exactly for this kind of situation – it takes your mask and randomly chops out parts of it. After doing this and plugging both into your splat converter, your rock regions will have patches of the breakup layer scattered all across it.

Re: washed out look: Almost certainly this is due to having each layer be a little bit active, which basically turns the output texture into mush. The answer to this is the “exclusion” slider in the splat converter, which forces the dominant texture at a given location to, well, dominate. Small values make the textures pop again, while large values will push out every other texture there and make the splat single-textured at that spot. Use with caution, but it is an essential parameter for splats with lots of inputs.

Let me know if any of the above helped!

#3

Thanks Remnant! I’m going to have a look over the next couple of days and will get back to you with how I got on!

#4