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updated Sat Jul 30th 2005 at 10:26am
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Texture Blending
updated Sat Jul 30th 2005 at 10:26am
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15242 views
by Andrei (view all articles)
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How to blend two existing textures
You?ve probably noticed how annoying it is to have such an obvious border between grass and any other solid material like concrete or pavement. The solution is simple, though: blending two textures (If you don?t know what the heck I?m talking about look-up a displacement tutorial and read about alpha masking).
Here?s what you have to do:
Create an empty notepad document, paste the following text in it (quotes and everything) and save the file as a .vmt.
In the example above, the main texture is ?nature/snowfloor001a? and ?concrete/concretefloor037a? is the alpha that will be applied to the base texture. In this case it means that you can paint a road on the snow surface. The ?snowfloor001a? texture comes with HL2DM but if you?re working with something else look up one of the non-blending grass textures that come with HL2 (like ?nature/grassfloor002a?).
The beauty of blending two materials that already come with the game you?re working for is that there is not need to create a .vtf (valve texture file) at all, the .vmt being enough to get the texture working.
The rest of the strings in there are somewhat optional. For example, ?%tooltexture? defines what the texture will look like in the editor?s texture browser so you can write any texture path you want as it really doesn?t matter. I even left it blank once and it still worked. Still, it might be a good idea to have one of the two blending textures as the tooltexture so that you?ll be able to find it faster. You might also want to give it a relevant keyword. The example?s keyword is ?blend? but there are many other textures with this keyword so giving it a unique one might prove more efficient.
That?s all you need to do. Complicated wasn?t it? For a minimal amount of effort and 20 spare seconds you can have very nice results. Here?s how the example texture looks:
Here?s what you have to do:
Create an empty notepad document, paste the following text in it (quotes and everything) and save the file as a .vmt.
"WorldVertexTransition"
{
"$basetexture" "nature/snowfloor001a"
"$basetexture2" "concrete/concretefloor037a"
"%tooltexture" "nature/snowfloor003a"
"%keywords" "blend"
}
In the example above, the main texture is ?nature/snowfloor001a? and ?concrete/concretefloor037a? is the alpha that will be applied to the base texture. In this case it means that you can paint a road on the snow surface. The ?snowfloor001a? texture comes with HL2DM but if you?re working with something else look up one of the non-blending grass textures that come with HL2 (like ?nature/grassfloor002a?).
The beauty of blending two materials that already come with the game you?re working for is that there is not need to create a .vtf (valve texture file) at all, the .vmt being enough to get the texture working.
The rest of the strings in there are somewhat optional. For example, ?%tooltexture? defines what the texture will look like in the editor?s texture browser so you can write any texture path you want as it really doesn?t matter. I even left it blank once and it still worked. Still, it might be a good idea to have one of the two blending textures as the tooltexture so that you?ll be able to find it faster. You might also want to give it a relevant keyword. The example?s keyword is ?blend? but there are many other textures with this keyword so giving it a unique one might prove more efficient.
That?s all you need to do. Complicated wasn?t it? For a minimal amount of effort and 20 spare seconds you can have very nice results. Here?s how the example texture looks:
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