jr_walker 10 Posted March 21, 2011 (edited) Hi Folks, It’s been awhile since I last bothered you for help; undoubtedly high-time I do so again. :p Can anyone share techniques that would eliminate or reduce the texture blending border as shown below between the blue lines (approximately 1m wide)? I’ve reviewed a few maps and found some to have this (Takistan is an example) and others not. Since the map is mostly desert there isn’t a lot of clutter to disguise the transition. From 100m away or from the air, it looks like my hills are suffering a bad case of the measels or wringworm (inset). As always, thanks for any advice you might share, Walker Edited March 21, 2011 by JR_Walker spelling Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
tupolov 520 Posted March 22, 2011 Have you checked how many colours are in your mask_lco? Sometimes this is caused by feathering in your mask using shades of colours that don't match the layers.cfg. Tup Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
jr_walker 10 Posted March 22, 2011 Thanks for the response Tup. I have only 4 colors (see mask below). I am confident the mask contains only the 4 colors and no bleeding (I checked that using Photoshop). I thought that perhaps if the textures were similar in color, etc. that the blending effect would be less, but the screen shot (inset) shows that even two identical textures (one has clutter and one does not) have the blend border. (Just for information, on the mask the un-cluttered texture is represented in gray and the identical, but cluttered, texture is represented in dark blue.) Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
oldbear 390 Posted March 22, 2011 Let's try using more simple and different colours for the mask like in the legend.png. Try only with red, blue, green, yellow. I had such on one of the map I was working on due to the use of what looks like green variations ... one of the things I have done for the Sturko map :cool: Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
bushlurker 45 Posted March 22, 2011 Hi JR! Haven't ventured a solution for this one as yet - mainly 'cause I don't actually have one! - in fact, I've had this problem myself on a terrain or two... Normally I'd suggest all the usual "check number of colours, check edges for feathering, etc", but I'm quite sure you've covered all those obvious possibilities already... As usual, The Wiki is typically cryptic... "All 4 terrain types can be blended together within one pixel of the layer map (2m x 2m on Sahrani), although blending is rarely used"... is the nearest reference I can find... not too helpful... an abandoned technique on a previous game version... :(... fairly typical... Old Bears suggestion is a good one and worth a try - bright simple primaries... Another idea might be to remove the texture that seems to get "edged" entirely from your "Data" folder - .rvmat and all, and replace it with a completely different texture - lift one from Chernarus or something - rename all the files to your current naming convention and drop them in to "Data" - a quick way of testing a substitute texture (just don't lose or confuse your real texture... copy it somewhere safe first) ;) To be on the safe side, also delete the "Layers" folder in your project "Data" folder, then generate a new one by re-importing Sat & Mask.... save the .wrp and binarize and test... if you don't get the same edging maybe it's specific texture or .rvmat related? Some sort of mask issue or some sort of specific texture issue are the most obvious places to look I guess... a process of elimination situation... Worth a bit of experimenting anyway... it's not entirely unusual... as you say, I've seen it on several islands myself... there has to be a reason... B Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
bushlurker 45 Posted March 24, 2011 (edited) Just thought I'd revisit this thread and this issue just to say - "I've managed to reproduce the problem, dammit!" ;) Here's a couple of quick pics from a little side-project I've been working on... very basic 4 colour mask - Sand, Grass, Slope and Rock 4-way ground textures... absolutely and definitely no other surfaces defined, or colours on the mask that shouldn't be there... First up - a Sand > Rock transition (both custom textures)... OK - clearly there's some sort of "border blend" going on here - the result being a border that's sort of "hazy" - it has the texture of the rock - but the palette of the sand... difficult to quantify exactly, but it looks like a sort of roughly 1 meter "overlap" area where this happens - a little further down towards the beach and the proper sand kicks in nicely... Since I'm pretty sure there's no layers/mask/surfaces dodginess going on, I figured that maybe it was something to do with the textures themselves, or the .rvmats - like I suggested in the post above... Both these textures are just homemade ones, so I guess I could've screwed something up... However... since I haven't made a "slope" texture yet, I'm using a Takistan "stony ground" placeholder, and I'm getting the same issue with it too... A Rock > Slope transition in that pic... particularly handy since the Takistan "stony ground" has that distinctive "pink" colour... It's easy to see the actual properly showing Takistan texture (pink stones), the blended border where it's the Takistan texture, but the rocks texture palette (grey stones), and the okay rocks area itself... so... it's still happening with at least one "official" texture involved..... I guess a final test would be with only "official" textures in use... that would eliminate the textures or .rvmats as the culprits.... Still no real idea what's causing this... I'm starting to think it's maybe something to do with that whole tricky cell size / texture layer / segment / sat layer size settings thing in Project Parameters... It's not easy to mess much with that without causing other issues, but I guess the next step has to be to fool with some of those values - see if changing things has any effect... Still don't know exactly what they mean, but the Wiki starts to sound slightly less cryptic... All 4 terrain types can be blended together within one pixel of the layer map That's 1.25m for me on this particular project, and I'm guessing 1m for Walker - which seems to tie in with the visual effect we're seeing... ...although blending is rarely used ... and I can see why! ;) I'll post again if I come up with anything of interest..... B Edited March 24, 2011 by Bushlurker Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
oktyabr 12 Posted March 24, 2011 Very interesting study Bushlurker! It would be nice to have a fine control over just how much blending took place, "strength" on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0... without messing around with cell size, etc.! Perhaps a random variable as well. My island suffers even more from this blending with black rock and bright yellow sand! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
jr_walker 10 Posted March 25, 2011 (edited) Hello Old Bear and Mr. Lurker! Thanks for your responses and thanks for your experimentation Bushlurker. I tried each of your suggestions: First, I changed my basic, four texture Mask to be Red [255,0,0], Blue [0,255,0], Green [0,0,255] and Black [0,0,0]. If I didn’t know better, I would say the result was more pronounced blending. Then, thought I would be clever and change the black mask to be Red but [254, 0, 0] instead of [255,0,0]. Complete failure; didn’t even load the “black†texture (loaded the “red†texture in its place). I’d been having difficulty with NOPX textures so I modified the rvmat to use NOHQ instead with the simple Red, Blue, Green, Black mask. It made a difference (below) but didn’t really “fix†the issue as you can see (maybe this is a clue to someone who understands this stuff better than I). I looked at the color values of the sat mask, but I don’t see an obvious correlation/difference between the area that worked as expected and the area with the blend border (I may study this more). Tonight I will try “official†Takistani textures, but based on Buslurker’s experiments, I don’t have high hopes. If necessary, I’ll then try modifying the rvmat further, but I’m thinking there isn’t too much to modify in the rvmat. Was planning on posting when I had completed all this or found a solution, but decided to give a progress report in response to the follow-up in the thread. Thanks much for the continued consideration…very appreciated. Update: After re-reading (and re-reading) the WIKI link Bushlurker provided, I think I've got it...and, if so, now understand why the map legend is important. I'm in the middle of buldozing my "orginal" textures experiment, but I'll try out the new idea after (or perhaps tomorrow evening) and respond back. Edited March 25, 2011 by JR_Walker Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
jr_walker 10 Posted March 26, 2011 (edited) My experiments have not yet resulted in elimination of the border blending. In fact, although it appeared in Buldozer that part of the blended border was eliminated in some circumstances, the border appeared in its full glory after bianarzation. However, I do think I have a better understanding of the maplegend (may or may not be correct): According to the texturing link Bushlurker provided above, the understanding I have now is that: a texture is associated with an RGB color in the legend (doesn’t matter what the color is as long as the color references only a single texture; however, a single texture can be referenced to other colors in the legend – an important fact relative to the way I now believe seamless blending is supposed to work). A given texture can seamlessly blend with the texture to its immediate right or left as defined in the legend, but not necessarily to others. If a given texture is intended to blend with more than the textures on its immediate right or left, the texture legend reference is defined again: If I understand correctly, based on the example legend above, the texture “Beach Tran†will blend well with “R_Common†and “Grass†and will also blend well with “D_Common†and "Beach" (because "Beach Tran" was defined a second time) but will not blend well with “Rocksâ€. In the Layers.cfg file the textures in this example would be defined: R_Common[]={{0,255,255}}; Beach_Tran []={{0,255,131},{207,11,0}}; //note two color references for the Beach_Tran texture Grass[]={{0,255,0}}; Rocks[]={{121,255,0}}; D_Common[]={{255,255,0}}; Beach[]={{7,3,0}}; And the same colors as those defined in the Layers.cfg file are used in the mask_ico to represent the associated texture. I continue determine a solution for the texture blend issue. I will post up if any progress is made. Edited March 26, 2011 by JR_Walker Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
