Making Displacements and their Blend Materials

Started by wallworm, October 29, 2016, 01:40:53 PM

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GT

It's going to be about a week since I can't get the displacement blended material to work, I tried everything. I can see the blend material in "Browse" list in Hammer (I don't use Hammer at all), I can see the material in Viewport (top texture at least), but there is always pink-black checker texture on displacements in game (L4D). Here is my setup (4K screenshot):

https://www.stasanet.cz/out/ftp/static/_temp/gt/displacement-blend_error.png

Max file (incl. Materials):
https://www.stasanet.cz/out/ftp/static/_temp/gt/displacement-blend_error.rar
(cca 5 MB)

And there is more:

1) How to get blended materials to work in my 3DS Max 2017 Viewport? I tended to use 2016 because of Vue, but I don't use it anymore since it looks terrible on 4K LCDs. I use World Machine only now, but my alpha painting is not working, the DirectX shader shows only top texture and there is error whenever I want to update blended material (see screenshot).

2) Can somebody (I pray for Shawn) write exact instructions, how to apply Slope Mask to Height Map so that the black areas of the Slope Mask will be the top texture and the white areas bottom texture of Wall Worm blended material? I have the MapToVColor modifier installed and I tried to follow advices from this post with similar effect, but I can't find the Slope Mask part anywhere:
https://www.wallworm.net/index.php?topic=1297.0

Height Map:
https://www.stasanet.cz/out/ftp/static/_temp/gt/torla_605m_heightmap.png
(cca 67 MB)

Slope Mask:
https://www.stasanet.cz/out/ftp/static/_temp/gt/torla_605m_slopemask.png
(cca 67 MB)

3) Is possible to have Specular Map and Normal Map on both materials of Wall Worm blended material?

EDIT: updated links...

wallworm

The error PNG goes to a 404 page not found. As does the Max file link.

Direct answers:

1) A standard blend won't show in the viewport with vertex alpha. Only the DX shaders. I'd suggest that you set WW's global settings to use the Black Mesa shader for blends. And set the multiblend to 4way blend shader. That will only affect newly created blends, though. Also, the DX shaders may only work with Nitrous in DX 11, so do not switch to DX 9 version of Nitrous. Once the DX shaders are applied, paint them on Channel -2 for Blend and Channel 10 for 4way blend.

2) For your slope mask and height: Assuming you are working on a single displacement sculpt mesh, just put the height map in your displacement modifier and set the displacement mod to Planar map and use channel 2. Now make the slope and height bitmaps use channel 2 .

3) Add the MapToVColor modifier and have it use the slope mask and set to output to channel -2. Note channel -2/-1 are available in latest version of MapToVColor. Grant Adams (who wrote that plugin) recently added that when I asked. I'm assuming it's in the current downloads, but he sent me a copy directly. If not, you can probably ask him to send you that version. If not, follow the copy channel info from other page.

3) Yes. Your success in previewing them in viewport may be limited, but they will export to game fine. Use Specular Level Map for the $envmapmask.


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