Color-based per-pixel blending of detail textures with GLSL code

Category: Developers •

Nov 18, 2011

This paper describes a method for blending detail textures over terrain. Instead of using masks to define how much each texture to blend into a given fragment of the terrain the color of the base texture is used. A color is assigned to each detail map used, for example some shade of green for grass, a shade of brown for soil, gray for rock and so on. Then, when rendering the terrain, at each output fragment each detail map is blended with a contribution inversely proportional to the ‘distance’ of the base texture color from the color assigned to the detail map in question. This paper comes with GLSL code samples.