Sorry, the subject line sounds pretty confusing, but I couldn’t come up with a better one :eyebrowlift2:
This is what I have - I have a terrain mesh (island), with several materials (or textures?) blended using vertex colors as masks (sand for the shore line, grass, rock’ish terrain, etc.)
The transition from one material to another is just a simple gradient, so to speak. Is it possible to add a mask to break up that smooth transition and make it look more natural ?
In game engines when 2 textures are blended in the similar fashion, an alpha mask can be used to break up the transition. For example, if sand transitions to rocks, an alpha mask where rocks are white and gaps between them are black, would make it look like a natural transition from sand to rocks with sand going between rocks. Something you can see in this article: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AndreyMishkinis/20130716/196339/Advanced_Terrain_Texture_Splatting.php
How can I do that in Blender (rendering with Cycles) ?
It seems to be a shader code for materials specifically for Unity, but it’s GLSL and can be used in Blender too. I am not sure how to implant it into as a material shader, but there should be tutorials for that on YouTube if its possible. I saw a post somewhere stating it’s possible to use custom shaders in materials. I hope you find your answer!
The colour ramp defines how the noise is mixed in
Since the vertex paint provides values 0 to 1 then the noise is is given a value when the vertex pain is 0.6 ish
The noise is heightened by the multiplier to make it more distinct
That’s almost exactly what I mean, except instead of noise it should be an alpha mask (b/w image) that matches one of the textures. Here is an example:
