This is a followup to my previous post “Blender and World Creator Workflow - Surface” and in this one we’ll be dealing with bringing over the fancy textures you’ve applied to your World Creator 2 project. We’re going to start with a three texture setup, having more textures becomes much harder to model with this method and is left as an exercise to the reader.
World Creator
- Add some dope textures to your world!
- Go to Export in the top-right corner, go to the Textures tab and set the following settings:
- Select Type: Splat Map.
- Make sure your three textures have “Include:” checked.
- Export and save
splatmap.tga
in the folder for your render.
Image Editing Program
If you don’t have the ability to export ultra high resolution Splat Maps from World Creator 2 because like me you’re on the Basic version, you can do the following:
- Open up
splatmap.tga
in your preferred image editing program. - Scale the image size up by 2-4 on both width and height, preferably with a built-in algorithm to avoid hard pixellated edges.
- Save the new file as
splatmap-large.tga
in the folder for your render.
This should reduce the appearance of jaggy/blurry artifacts on your textured terrain close up, but won’t be perfect.
File System
- Copy all your textures into the folder for your render.
Blender
- Select the plane containing your terrain that we set up in the last post.
- Open up the
Shader Editor
panel in Blender. - Create a new material consisting of:
- A
Principled BSDF
node with the BSDF output attached to; - A
Material Output
node’s Surface.
- Create an
Add
node. This is found under Add -> Color ->MixRGB
-> Set to “Add” type and plug the output into the Base Color of thePrincipled BSDF
node. - Another
Add
node, with the output into Color1 of the firstAdd
node from #4.
- Set the Color1 property of this new
Add
node to black, with a HSVA of 0, 0, 0, 1.
- A
Darken
node (Add -> Color ->MixRGB
-> Set to “Darken”) plugged into Color2 of theAdd
node from #4. - An
Add
node into Color1 of theDarken
from #6.
- Set the Color1 property of this new
Add
node to black, with a HSVA of 0, 0, 0, 1.
- An
Add
node into Color2 of theDarken
from #6.
- Set the Color1 property of this new
Add
node to black, with a HSVA of 0, 0, 0, 1.
- Create three
Image Texture
nodes (Add -> Texture ->Image Texture
).
- Align each
Image Texture
node with one of theAdd
nodes from steps #5, #7, and #8. - Set the Image property to the image for one of the textures you want to use (using the Open button).
- Use the Color output from the
Image Texture
to link to the Color2 dot on the respectiveAdd
node.
- Create a
Separate RGB
node (Add -> Converter ->Separate RGB
). - Add an
RGB Curves
node (Add -> Color ->RGB Curves
) and plug the Color output into the Image input on theSeparate RGB
node from #10. - Create an
Image Texture
node.
- Set the Image property to be your
splatmap-large.tga
. - Set the Color Space as
Non-Color
. - Link the Color output to the Color input on the
RGB Curves
node from #11.
- From the
Separate RGB
node (from #10), link each of the R, G, and B outputs to theFac
properties of the threeAdd
nodes (from #5, #7, and #8)
- This will require you to manually investigate which texture refers to which colour in your
splatmap-large.tga
file.
Once you’ve aligned the right colours, you should be ready to render. Of course, if you don’t have textures that are perfectly suited to the environment, you might want to do create a Texture Coordinate
node (Add -> Input -> Texture Coordinate
) that plugs from the UV output into the Vector input on some Mapping
(Add -> Vector -> Mapping
) nodes which plug each Vector output into the Vector input on the three Image Texture
nodes (from #9). You can then modifey the Scale property on the Mapping
nodes to represent the tiled nature of your texture.
You should end up with a completed node graph like below (click to open a larger view):
If you want, you can also add normal or displacement graphs by expanding upon the technique outlined above. This should allow you to create images like this (click to open a larger view):
Keep in mind, the above is some of my older work before I’d perfected the technique, so still retains some low resolution artifacts.
I’m still working on techniques to improve it and will add any updates as I develop new techniques.