Vertex Color Texture Blending, [bounty ?]

#21 Yeah, it would be helpful. A lot of the interest in Torque is going to come from people who don't have a lot of money (like me) and can't afford 3500 bucks for a Maya/Max license.

(Actually I think Blender is just as good for game modeling, it just falls short on the vertex alpha thing.)

#22 Just wanted to note that i would happily throw 20 dollars towards releasing this shader to the community and i bet others would aswell!
Also, it is looking very good!
If you make editors for it, the fact that blender can't edit vertex alpha doesn't matter as you can just edit it from within Torque!

#23 Heh, I was actually about to point that out. I was at work during my last reply and so managed to totally forget about that part of it.

I don't think I'll be doing too much work tonight though as I have my own game that really needs some attention. But by the end of the day tomorrow I hope to have normal maps blended in, and possibly spec too. After that, code cleanup. Since I'm doing (shamefully) a lot of copy-paste-tweak of GG's code, theres a lot to clean up.

After that, heightmap weighting and parallax. Then start on the editor side of things.

#24 Wow Jacob, great work!
How do you think to release this? As a shader pack to buy? Or for free?
It is such a nice addition that I would absolutely pay for it and I think many other people there.

#25 Ughh... FINALLY got normal maps to blend in. This was a WAY more painful process than I could've foreseen.



And as for how I'll release it, I think I'm definitely gonna go with my "community purchase" idea. Basically just everyone can chip in whatever they like towards the total price of a public release. Long ways away from that though, be patient. ;)

#26 Dude, that's great. Can you apply it to the terrain system easily? That seems to be its biggest Achilles' heel.

#27 ? The terrain already works like this. The resolution of the texture blend is based on the space between vertices, which is how the terrain system already works. What is it you need the terrain to do that's different than it already does?

#28 I guess I just can't get it to blend properly. All the transitions in the terrain always look stark. It's probably operator error. media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/10/9393/Terrain_01_Maya_01_14.jpg is what I'd like to do eventually, you can see the blend layers. There are like 4 or 5 textures there based on heightmap.

#29 Ah. For that, the best you can do is manually create a base texture that has some smooth blends. As far as the detail textures blending together gradually, that's a different issue entirely. It'd really turn in to a bit of a task to get that to work, and certainly not on my to-do list.

#30 @Jacob .. fantastic work there ! .. I Will definitely contribute some cash for this feature .. well done :)

#31 So something that I think will remain in place to simpeify things is a little bit of a limitation. Basically whatever map you wanna blend must also be in the base level. So for example, if your blend texture has a normal map, the material you're blending with must also have a nnormal map. Same for spec. Pretty small limitation, and really cuts down on the amount of extra stuff that needs worked out.

#32 I'd just like to apologize for the sudden lull in progress. I've been taking a bit of a break lately from some work. After a bit of a semi-nervous breakdown from over-stressing myself with game dev work, I just needed to take little bit of time to take a breather. ;) Haven't forgotten by any means, and will be continuing soon.

#33 No worries, take your time, we appreciate the effort.

#34 @Jakob been a while, any updates?

#35 Unfortunately no updates right now, I know it's been a stupidly long amount of time. Things just kept getting increasingly crazy and didn't get a chance to work on this, got pushed to the backburner. However I DO plan to resurrect work on it in a couple weeks and I know how to tackle it as well. So much progress should be happening very soon. :)

Basically my roadmap is:

1) Finish a new demo scene. Something to keep my art skills in check.
2) Finish an update for my T3D Environment Pack
3) Continue work on texture blending as well as the game I'm working on. The game will make use of this feature, so it's kind of part of my work there.

So all in all, 2-3 weeks and I should be back on top with this. :)

#36 No rush from my side tbh, just didn't want to have a guy working on this if a solution was being brewed somewhere else ;)
Sounds great tho! I really look forward to hear more from this project! ;)

#37 This looks great!

#38 Hi @Jacob, how far are you with this... I'm still waiting with my credit card in my hand :-)

Just needed to bump this thread as I watched a video about mesh paint in UDK:

www.3dmotive.com/f100602

#39 I'm also looking for this. Bump! :)