Blending textures on brushes?

(eRRoLfLyNN) #1

Hi there. Love this game, possibly tooo much, and thought I’d try my hand at making a map for me and my buddies to enjoy. I’ve created a few a few buildings and a dynamitable objective and complied and tested it all successfully, after much pulling hair and reading of these pages.

I was just wondering if there is a way to blend textures on brushes that make up buildings. My buildings all look very plain and standard. i was just trying to find a way to make them look a bit more interesting.

I know with EasyGen, or whatever, you can blend the textures of the terrain, but I was wondering if there was an easy way to do this on the brushes of the buildings? I was having a run around Oasis on my own last night, and I noticed in the Old City square that the tops and bottoms of the buildings are a different texture from the rest, but they seem to blend well together into the rest of the walls, and are unnoticable. :???:

Any ideas? Forgive me if I am being dumb!

(blushing_bride) #2

well i dont think you can blend textures on a single brush but if you want to make your buildings look more interesting then use more brushes. So the wall in oasis is probably made of three brushes one on top of the other (like bricks). If you look carefully at the textures many have the same base colours so can be joined up to make seemless surfaces.

(eRRoLfLyNN) #3

Thanks blushing_bride, I will give that a go. :drink:

(badong) #4

you can’t do the kind of blending of textures that you have in terrain in any vertical brushes. it’s because that type of blending can only be done on textures projected on the z-axis(god how i hope i could do that on vertical buildings as well).
Anyway like bb said the best way to achieve the blending effect is to have a third texture that’s a blend between the two that you’re trying to blend and then place this texture on a surface that’s between the two surfaces with the textures you want to blend(did that make any sense?)
Remember to use the surface inspector (press S with the face selected) to position the texture and align it correctly with the rest of the textures.

(Detoeni) #5

If you look through the shader manual that come with et, you will see there are a number of ways to this, decal shaders can be used to overlay a texture, or using shaders with a blend function, you can mix two textures together. It’s just the same effect as the terrain blending but without a bitmap controlling the shader. If you only want to see certain parts of a texture an alpha layer can be used to control what bits are drawn.

(badong) #6

You’re talking about textures with alpha channels here right? I don’t think you can achieve the type of blending like in terrain with plain .JPGs. I’ve tried a bunch of combinations of the blending fucntions and I’ve never come even close to geting a blend similar to what the bitmaped terrain gives you. Anyway if you know any good blend fucntions combos or shader scripts that give you blends close to the bitmaped terrain ones please gimme gimme gimme…
(oh by the way… i’m taking about blending plain .jpg’s here or .tga’s with no alphas)

(Detoeni) #7

The types of blending you can do with jpg’s is quite limited verses tga+alpha.
Your best of learning to make and use tga+alpha, it’s not hard once you get the hang of it. Now writing a shader to get the texture to work is not so easy. Best bet, to start with, is to look for standard shaders that have the effect you want and modify them to your needs.

(badong) #8

i got no problem making and using alphas, the reason i don’t like them is cause using an alpha channel means you gotta save your texture as a 32bit tga which in turn means that even a 256x256 texture will end up being something like 250KB. I tend to use mostly custom textures and if I use tga or even worse 32bit tga’s, my map will end up being 50 MB.

(Detoeni) #9

I would not worry about that, once the textures in a pk3, and compressed, it will only be about 10% of its original file size.

(eRRoLfLyNN) #10

Yes, it did! :smiley:

Thanks, because I was wondering about (the “in between”) texture doubling up / repeating itself. I never knew about this feature of Radiant!

(MuffinMan) #11

just for completion - press shift + s to get the surface inspector for patches (cylinders, bevels and stuff)