Not-so-hot on the heels of my previous lament, I viewed a few videos after having been turned on to the mechanics of splat maps. A splat map is a mask which can take a few forms, but I’ve been working with the one that World Creator produces which is a series of “yes/no” masks that can be used to show textures in certain areas. I may be oversimplifying or even getting that explanation completely wrong but this is how I understand them.

This Land is Made for Render-ing

My journey to create terrains started with third party options because packages like Gaea and World Creator provide methods for texturing through colors, gradients, image textures, and even Adobe Substance materials. When viewed inside of World Creator, for example, the results are pretty OK.

The issue with this is that what you see is the only thing you get. I could use this as a background image for renders made in Blender, and there are pros for why I might want to consider that, but the biggest con is that I could never integrate objects into the scene and that includes not being able to use the output as set extensions in Resolve Fusion or After Effects (at least not fully).

World Creator allows for sync export to Blender (and other design apps as well). Doing so takes a lot of the guess-work out of what to export and how to set things up in Blender, but there’s a bit of a problem: I don’t like how it looks.

What you see here is the terrain rendered as a displacement modifier on a subdivided plane using the height map exported from World Creator. The automated export builds a shader tree inside Blender using the aforementioned splat maps to apply different textures that World Creator provided. This desert canyon design isn’t anything special. Since I only had two layers of color, World Creator produced a single splat map where the blues display the canyon walls and the pinkish areas display the plateaus.

Since the sync’d version of the terrain looks like refried beans when rendered in Blender, I set out to understand how to use splat maps with higher resolution textures.

Megascans

In addition to the Unreal Engine, Epic has been curating a sizable library of some very hi-res images that can be used for texturing, called “Megascans”.

Each download consists of several files including color, AO, roughness, and other maps which have a place in providing realistic textures for objects in game and rendering engines. The selection above is free, but there are several paid options as well (the entire Megascans library was “free” until the end of 2024 — and I swear I took them up on that offer but I can’t find them– as Epic has since moved them to a paid service called “Fab”).

Better Textures for Better Canyons

I downloaded these two textures from Fab. The “rock cliff” was used for the rise of the canyon, and the “canyon sandy mud” was used for the run. I figured that the dual tint and textures of the materials would make for a good contrast while being true to the environment.

I can’t show you what I did in Blender because like a dumbass, I overwrote my “good” example with the crappy sync example just to get screenshots for this post. I’ll try and recreate the “good” version again later and update here and as a one-off on Mastodon/Pixelfed, but know that I used the splat maps exported from World Creator to mask and reveal the Megascan textures, resulting in this beauty.

I did render with DOF because up close the textures were still a bit skeezy, but were nowhere near as bad as the sync’d textures direct from World Creator. Needless to say, I am very pleased with this result. You can see the canyon walls using the “rock cliff” texture, and the lighter “canyon sandy mud” is used on the ground and horizontal planes of the canyon. At this distance, I might almost mistake the image for a real canyon on a cloudless day, and it should be more than adequate for further adventures in 3D composition. The fact that it looks this good in Blender means that I could also look good when in motion as a set extension in Resolve, but I am no where near that batshit level project right now. My next step should be to get a terrain with more varied visuals, find some free or affordable textures, and make sure my technique holds water when there’s more detail on the line.

Scopique

Husband, father, gamer, developer, and curator of 10,000 unfinished projects.