From Ecksdee

Poor man material map creation (or the only way i know to get huge ones)

Contents 1 What you will need 2 Creating the noise 3 Turning the noise into a normal map 4 Resultant normal map 5 Creating the material map 6 Colouring the materialmap via using indexed 7 Result

What you will need

• planetGenesis (java based)
• The Gimp
• normal map plugin for The Gimp

The advantages over terragen method is that the terain is unlimited in size but an inconvenience is that I didn't find a simple way to take height in consideration.

Creating the noise

First let's create the heightmap, using planet genesis may give better results than gimp solid noise.

Here is the raw resulting file , if you want to manually add features to the map , this is the time to do so. Just paint onto it. If you have trouble imagining what it will look like, go back and forward to the next step and use the normal map preview to get a better idea.

Turning the noise into a normal map

Now convert it to rgb, otherwise the normalmapping operation will not be available.

In the beginning the scale is too small, so you have to change it to match your needs.

Resultant normal map

The resulting normal map:

Creating the material map

Then here comes the trick (it wasn't at all easy to find), the blue component is infact an equivalent to the slope, thus we only need to keep the blue. For some reason that I can't remember it is clamped to 0-128 colors and often is under 70 different colors, thus we need 2 subsequent operations, the normalise operation to have an homogenous amount of colors in the greyscale spectrum and a blur operation to increase the number of colors or else you will see a lot of small steps.

Colouring the materialmap via using indexed

Choose a very low number of colors, you dont want more than 6 or the performance hit is too large.

I changed the default set of greyscale colours to something a bit more flashy.

Result

And here is the resulting material map, the second posterised before converting to indexed without dithering. You can see it has a different look, this is for you to experiment with ingame, however you prefer it

As this is the resulting material map, if you want to add lets say a road on the montain side , this is a good time to paint it in. if you have trouble imagining the end result then load this map as a layer of the rgb heightscale map, convert the heightscale map to a normal map, and in the preview window you can choose which diffuse texture to apply to the 3d preview of the normal map.