Presagis

Hi I have a couple quick questions about Creator tools.  They are both simple solutions but I don’t know the program very well and I’ve been having some difficulty.

My first and biggest problem is with layered texturing.  I want to be able to blend several images together with offsets for a large repeating texture for a landscape.  Short of that, I would be comfortable with an alpha-mapped texture that can be layered on top of another.When I followed the steps in the Help Topics for Creator, I saw none of the results in the scene.  Its possible that this has to do with my graphics card not being able to display the blended textures, but I don’t know for sure.  I’ve seen small changes as I alter the layers but it doesn’t look like its working correctly.  I just see solid colors for each layer but the blend layer and that one only seems to get brighter or darker with layering. Would anyone be able to provide me with a rough summary of the steps that need to be taken to set up a proper blended or layered texture?  I know that the texture must have an alpha channel (like a .rgba file), but are there any other concerns for the type of image that I use?

My other question seems silly but I can’t seem to resolve it.  I’m not sure how I can move things vertically in the world space.  I have buildings and other pieces that need to be placed on mountains and hills, but its proving to be strangely complicated.  The move tool works fine most of the time, but some complex pieces won’t let me use that tool.  The Translate tool doesn’t seem to be able to translate across all three axes.  It seems like a simple thing but the answer has alluded me, even though I’ve gone through all the menus and help topics that I can find.

Thank you very much for any help you can offer.  Take care!

Hi Tristanp,

For blending textures you need to know a few things.

First, make sure you have your view mode set to blend in your view panel, or you won’t see the end result. 

Each texture has to be mapped to a layer on the geometry. You have up to 8 texture layers to work with.  (set the layer you want to work on in the view panel, then go back to blend to see results.)

Each texture has a set of attributes that tell it how to blend with other layers. See the help documents for a description of the blend modes available.

From your description it sounds like your blend modes are not set up to do what you want.

Hello!  Thank you for the response.  I’m going to check all the settings for the texture to see if I can make it work.  I think its the attributes for the textures that I need to look at, correct?  They have options like Modulate, Blend, etc that I was messing around with.  I probably didn’t pick the right ones.  Thank you very much.  I’ll check on it as soon as I get back into the office and I’ll post some more specifics if I’m still having trouble.

Okay I’m still not having any luck.  I turned on alpha blending in the view panel, and I made sure that alpha blending was checked in the State Preferences.  When I double click on the texture in the Texture Palette it brings up the Attributes where I can set the texture environment to Add, Blend, Decal, etc.  Is that were I need to set them up?  It doesn’t seem to acknolwedge any of the layers past 0 as anything other than a modification of the blended textures color.

I can put a dark texture on layer 1, for example, and the blend shown will be significantly darker but won’t incorporate any of the imagery in the texture on layer 1.  It doesn’t even show when I have that layer selected.  The only layer that actually shows the image is 0.  I’ve tried changing the order of the images but that hasn’t resulted in any blending.  I tried making a transparent texture (with the texture editor in creator) to place on one layer and allow another texture to be seen through it, but it isn’t represented at all on any layer expect 0, which just makes the ground see-through.

I’m just really confused by how this works.  I work in Maya and Max and I feel pretty comfortable with shaders but it seems like this simple layering is eluding me.  I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.  Thoughts?

I think what might be confusing here is the fact that alpha is ignored for most of the blend modes.  For instance, if you take a single rectangle and map it with a road texture on the base layer. Then you take an oil stain texture that is all black with alpha that creates a blotch in the middle of opaque black texels, then you map this on layer 1.  Keep in mind that this texture has two sets of texels, black transparent texels (RGBA 0,0,0,0) and black opaque texels (RGBA 0,0,0,1).  If the oil spill texture is set to decal, then you will see the black blotches replace the road texture where they are opaque, and leave the road texture alone where they are transparent.  However if you set the blend mode to modulate, then you will see the entire road turn black.  Modulate ignores the alpha channel in the textures.  This is the way OpenGL works.  to get the effect to work, you need to make sure the transparent areas of your texture are the right color. (the RGB part).  For the modulate oil spill example, I would have to make all my transparent areas white (RGBA 1,1,1,0).