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Blender and World Creator Workflow - Texture

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

  1. Add some dope textures to your world!
  2. 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.
  1. Export and save splatmap.tga in the folder for your render.

World Creator 2 export settings for the texture.

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:

  1. Open up splatmap.tga in your preferred image editing program.
  2. Scale the image size up by 2-4 on both width and height, preferably with a built-in algorithm to avoid hard pixellated edges.
  3. 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

  1. Copy all your textures into the folder for your render.

Blender

  1. Select the plane containing your terrain that we set up in the last post.
  2. Open up the Shader Editor panel in Blender.
  3. Create a new material consisting of:
  • A Principled BSDF node with the BSDF output attached to;
  • A Material Output node’s Surface.
  1. Create an Add node. This is found under Add -> Color -> MixRGB -> Set to “Add” type and plug the output into the Base Color of the Principled BSDF node.
  2. Another Add node, with the output into Color1 of the first Add node from #4.
  • Set the Color1 property of this new Add node to black, with a HSVA of 0, 0, 0, 1.
  1. A Darken node (Add -> Color -> MixRGB -> Set to “Darken”) plugged into Color2 of the Add node from #4.
  2. An Add node into Color1 of the Darken from #6.
  • Set the Color1 property of this new Add node to black, with a HSVA of 0, 0, 0, 1.
  1. An Add node into Color2 of the Darken from #6.
  • Set the Color1 property of this new Add node to black, with a HSVA of 0, 0, 0, 1.
  1. Create three Image Texture nodes (Add -> Texture -> Image Texture).
  • Align each Image Texture node with one of the Add 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 respective Add node.
  1. Create a Separate RGB node (Add -> Converter -> Separate RGB).
  2. Add an RGB Curves node (Add -> Color -> RGB Curves) and plug the Color output into the Image input on the Separate RGB node from #10.
  3. 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.
  1. From the Separate RGB node (from #10), link each of the R, G, and B outputs to the Fac properties of the three Add 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):

Blender material simplified node graph for terrain.

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):

Blender with textured terrain imported from World Creator 2.

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.