solved Surface texture blending issue

[BobTheHunted 12]

I am noticing a really odd visual problem in my ground textures for my terrain.  Everything seems to work fine, except in some areas I get weird 'outlines' or 'borders' around a certain texture type on my terrain.  It is as if it is trying to fade into a different texture when it shouldn't be.

For example:
 

http://imgur.com/3xmh33A

http://imgur.com/Kv1XMyA

http://imgur.com/eFEWAMY

 

[Auss 208]

To many textures in that cell, max is 6 

[BobTheHunted 12]

4 minutes ago, Auss said:

To many textures in that cell, max is 6 

Unfortunately that isn't the case.  I have only up to five textures per cell (which I have properly set up) and no more than that.  I also have a normal map for the terrain, so I can only have five textures aside from that.

Unless there is a single rogue pixel somewhere in the mask, I don't really know what could be causing this issue

[opteryx 1562]

I also have this issue and I do not exceed the textures limit per cell either. Would really like an answer what's causing this because I'm using BIS textures.

[BobTheHunted 12]

I am using my own texture addon but with BIS textures at the moment. Don't know if that's relevant, but I guess I should mention it

 

[BobTheHunted 12]

Ok, weird thing.  I removed a texture on the mask and the problem is solved.  Is the 6 texture limit for the entire map?  I thought it was for each tile.  If it is, how do I properly separate them in photoshop so I know where each cell ends?  I thought I could just configure the grid to match the tiles and it would work, but apparently I am wrong.

Maybe there is a rogue pixel in the wrong  cell somewhere on the mask.  How can I pinpoint it's location?
 

[Cosmo_D41 117]

Unfortunately its not that easy having 6 textures in one square, because they overlap and therefore this applies to the adjustance squares too. The basic idea behind this, can be found here (also it referes to the old Visitor): https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Making_Satellite_Texture_and_Mask

 

But have not yet found a way to show these borders in terrainbuilder or so to make it easier for planing your mask. Until now i just to my masks, look into the game and where ever i so those problems, i adjust my map till it fits.
Maybe you could manually make a grid in photoshop or something (or have a look at the layers folder), but i would be thankfull too, if anyone knows an easier way to handle this.

[.kju 3245]

Use pennyworth's tool to verify your MASK: https://github.com/pennyworth12345/MaskColorChecker

[Cosmo_D41 117]

Oh that looks like a great tool, i will give it a try. Thanks for the link .kju!

[BobTheHunted 12]

I will look into these. Thanks for the suggestions!

 

[Richie 330]

13 hours ago, BobTheHunted said:

Is the 6 texture limit for the entire map? 
 

 

You can have 101 surfaces if you want, just no more than 6 per tile plus the overlap, you can get them values from the samplers tab in mapframe properties.

[Auss 208]

14 hours ago, BobTheHunted said:

Ok, weird thing.  I removed a texture on the mask and the problem is solved.  Is the 6 texture limit for the entire map?  I thought it was for each tile.  If it is, how do I properly separate them in photoshop so I know where each cell ends?  I thought I could just configure the grid to match the tiles and it would work, but apparently I am wrong.

Maybe there is a rogue pixel in the wrong  cell somewhere on the mask.  How can I pinpoint it's location?
 

 

It's not a weird thing, I told you what it was

[BobTheHunted 12]

1 minute ago, Auss said:

 

It's not a weird thing, I told you what it was

It's not a weird thing that the error is happening when it shouldn't be?

[Cosmo_D41 117]

Then i think you have to look for additional colours that shouldn't be on you map (or swich to indexed color-mode in Photoshop, so only your mask-colours can be used on the picture).

 

The tool posted from .kju is great and a lot of help to find those pixels that might be in different colours (or too many). It even selects and gives the detailed tiles that have problems, so you dont have to check the whole map (as well as it lists the colours present in that tile)

[Auss 208]

 

 

 

Quote

It's not a weird thing that the error is happening when it shouldn't be?

Farkk, how can u argue with logic like that.....

 

[BobTheHunted 12]

1 hour ago, Auss said:

 

 

 

Farkk, how can u argue with logic like that.....

 

I win

[BobTheHunted 12]

Ok, so I found a good way to get a 'grid' or some sort of visual representation of each cell of the surface mask and where they overlap (Or relatively close to it)

Using pennyworth's tool you can see a debug map for all of the cells that exceed the texture limit.
So, to get a basic idea of the layout easily, just do the following(in photoshop):

 

1. Create a new image (or layer) the same size as your mask image
2. Fill it with a random color.

3. Select filters > noise > add noise

     Settings:
      400%

      Uniform
      Not monochromatic

4. Press ok and wait until the noise generates, then adjust the brightness and contrast so there are no pure black pixels

5. If there are any darker pixels, you could just use select > color range to find them and fill them with a different color
6. Save the file and launch the bat file to pennyworth's program, there will be a lot of extra colors (might be a performance issue, but it worked for me.  If it is, you just need more than six colors per cell, or in this case the entire image)

7. When it's done, there will be a new debugmap.bmp in the bad tiles folder.  Select that file and import it into photoshop

8. Select > Color Range > Color pick black and set the fuzziness to 0, press ok (You can also do this to make quick selections of all of one single color on your mask image, quicker than magic wand, stuff like that)

9. Cut the pixels, paste them to a new layer, name it 'mask grid' or whatever, and you can use it as a basic guide for editing your mask.  You can now delete the 'noise' layers you made

10.  Not sure if this will work, but you could create guides in photoshop and set them to the middle of each black line (as they are several pixels thick, so not accurate down to the pixel)

and have a potentially more accurate guide.  Also, if the guides created in photoshop seem too thick or slightly out of place when at different zoom levels, you can turn off anti aliasing on grids/guides/helpers etc in the photoshop preferences, which should help if that becomes a problem

 

I will test out the accuracy of this and report back any issues, but hopefully it will work and be a quick method to use to determine cell boundaries in the future

[BobTheHunted 12]

http://imgur.com/0lJTH8W

This is what the end result looks like.  The grey lines are the grid (the guides are hidden here)

The tile in the top left is imported from my layers folder and lined up to match

 

It seems like there is a small offset that can be fixed if I simply lower the guides to line up with the bottom of the tile.

 

EDIT: It actually lines up perfectly, I just accidentally shifted the image up at some point and didn't notice.

[BobTheHunted 12]

Ok, it seems this problem has nothing to do with each individual cell.  I have a properly set up mask with no cells that exceed the 5 texture limit and when I run the mask image through mask checker it reports no errors or cells with more than 5 colors. 

 

It seems this is only happening when the map itself exceeds the 5 (or 6, without the normalmap) textures.

So the problem remains unsolved

 

EDIT: No matter how many textures I have, this issue is still present, so it isn't connected to the mask at all as far as I can tell

[BobTheHunted 12]

Ok, I managed to solve the issue (or at least I managed to make it go away for now)
I was talking to some people in the terrain makers discord channel and trying to troubleshoot my issue.  After a while I seemingly fixed the issue. 

 

Turns out it has nothing to do with my mask (other than the position of the textures).  It was the texture itself (the one with the borders, not the textures in the border)

 

Here is the message I sent in discord detailing the steps I had taken leading up to me solving the issue:

 

Quote

@Lappihuan @Pennyworth @Rhaonoa @HappyDuckie @Ice I managed to make the texture blending issue go away. I am not sure which one of these (or what combination) caused it to work. First thing I did was replace all the procedural textures in the layers.cfg with the ones featured on the biki layers documentation. Then I made sure those texture values were in quotes, as I noticed they weren't before for some reason (the .rvmats were though). After that I changed my rock surface color (the one visible as the outline) to be a red to match my map legend. I ordered the layers in the respective order they appear on my map legend in both the class layers and class legend section of layers.cfg.

 

 

At this point I had realized I hadn't tried changing the texture with the outlines (I was simply messing with the one that appeared as a border around it). I changed to a different material and changed the name to match. I opened my project in TB and removed all rasters, opened the map frame properties, re-selected my layers.cfg, pressed ok, saved, and closed. Then I cleared my layers folder of all the images. After this I reopened the TB project, reimported the normal/mask/sat mask, opened the mapframe properties, re-selected the layers.cfg again, and then generated all the layers.

 

 

When the conversion was done, I saved, exported a .wrp (just to be sure), and launched buldozer. Once it finally loaded all the objects, I could not find the blending issue anywhere on the map. At this point I found the original texture I was using and edited it in photoshop (applied offset filter, rotated ccw, adjusted brightness and contrast, and applied slight color correction). I made sure the nopx matched the new shape, saved both as 32bit tga's since they both had alpha channels, converted them to .paa's with the new name, made the .rvmat, and added them to my map data addon. The issue is still gone as far as I can tell, so it seems to have something to do with the texture itself. Not sure what, but something.

 

Thanks to Lappihuan, Pennworth, Rhaonoa, HappyDuckie, and Ice for the help and input

 

On 4/1/2017 at 2:21 PM, Auss said:

 

It's not a weird thing, I told you what it was

 

It still looks pretty weird to me :)

Edited April 5, 2017 by BobTheHunted
Couldn't post with formatting or something