I spent a long time working on setting up a landscape material to allow blending. I finally got it just like I wanted but found myself limited to only being able to paint a max of 3 layers per component. Obviously disappointed I did a massive optimization of the material and can now paint 4 layers per component.
My question is: Why can I only paint 4 layers, and how can I attempt to increase this?
Some more info about the material…
All textures are set to “Shared: Wrap”
I have 7 textures per layer and 3 textures that affect all layers
In my main diffuse blend I am using the “Blend_SoftLight” function
I have experimented with preview weight settings and tried setting one or more textures to “LB Alpha Blend”
I have adjusted the “Max Painted Layers Per Component” parameter
I have tested on multiple landscapes, and rebuilt the material from scratch
It is a hefty looking material, but only 4/16 texture samplers…
There are definitely extra features that are not 100% necessary, however very nice to have. I have good results with this set up and my FPS is pretty solid on a mediocre GPU…I do not want to have to change it. I have never had issues with painting many more than 4 textures, and this one has me stumped.
Any help is much appreciated…
Hello worldlearner0411,
What is happening is you are exceeding your texture samples. You can fix this by clicking on each of your samples, under the details panel navigate to your sample source, and change your sample source to Shared : Wrap.
Hi thanks for commenting , however I mentioned in the description that I have already done this.
That being said… last night I managed to get it to 6 layers by means of optimization. So the original question I guess is no longer relevant. One thing I would really like to know though, is why I am able to paint 6 layers now…but could only paint 4 before…yet my samplers and instructions has been the same the whole time. No optimization I have done has changed these figures.
Sorry, I missed that bit. I am glad you have been able to proceed through optimizing. Without taking a closer look at your material it would be hard to say what was causing you not to paint with more textures. If you would be willing to share a test project with this material in it I can have a closer look at it.
First of that material looks absolutely stunning. Good work on that. You did that in with 4 textures, im using 6 and it still looks crap. lol
Did you ever figure out the issue as its happened to me twice now and setting texture sampler to shared wrap worked. I know you did done that but im just wondering what else you may have done.
Thanks
Hey tenchu, its been about 2 years since I had this issue and I’m not 100% sure what the issue was. I have never had the issue since though. What you are seeing in these sample images is actually only 1 texture layer of the material. The thing that I changed that made it work was if you look at the sample image of the material you will notice that in each layer there is an alpha for snow. I made is so that all of them functioned off of a single world position alpha. However I left the parameters for each layer intact. So you can dictate snow per layer still, however there are also parameters that affect all snow. This material was a painting material that supported per layer procedural blending of textures. I was able to get blending this way that I found I could not achieve through other methods. That being said, if I were to produce a landscape material from scratch today I would not use this method. I believe that the best way to create a landscape material is to create a semi “auto” material. That is a material that has one layer blending textures based on height and slope, but also has layers that allow painting if you choose. I have another material that I created about a year ago that does this. The more layers you have painted in a scene the lower your performance will be. I have found that doing your best to combine affects to single layers yields better performance. My understanding of materials is much greater now then it was when this post was originally made and if you have any further questions or need any assistance, feel free to pm me. I understand how much goes into learning how to make landscape materials. It was a serious struggle for me because there was much less information available 2 years ago. There is still no good place to learn all of the information you need to know. Learning a program like world machine, understanding level streaming and how large to make your components, or how to make a good LOD system…there is a lot to learn.
