Making Terrain Textures

    Terrain textures in FreeVector are made from a set of five, 32 bit textures. The height map is the only 8 bit texture and should be a greyscale 1024 x 1024 image. Only 896 x 896 of the image will be used and the resulting terrain will be a mirror image of the greyscale height map. Below is an example of an 8 bit greyscale heightmap. 1/2 scale.

    The next set of three textures are the detail / color textures that will be spread across the terrain. Using pixel shader 1.0 will only color the terrain. Pixel shader 2.0 will allow bump mapping as well. The bump map will be automatically generated from the texture alpha channel. Below is an example of three detail textures and their alpha channels below them.

    The above three textures are mixed together using the Red, Green and Blue channels of a 32 bit bitmap. The alpha channel of this image is used as a shadow map for the whole terrain. Below is an example of the r, g and b components as well as the alpha channel. This image can be any size form 256 x 256 to 2048 x 2048.

    Below is an example of these textures mixed and blended by the color channels of the mix image. The shadow map is also spread across the terrain. This shadow map was made by taking a greyscale render from a terrain rendering program. The benefit is that it adds cloud shadows as well.