Texture transition editor

A guide to creating texture blending styles

Texture transition editor

Texture transition editor

Suppose you`ve drawn your dungeon map, and everything seems to be fine — you have the ground, the road towards the cave of the dead necromancer is paved with tiles, and there`s some grass illuminated by light from an unknown source... but something still feels not right. The thing is that all the textures are made as painted hexes and because of that all the magic is gone — there is no feeling that the tiles are placed on top of the ground or the grass is rising above the stones. Why so? Because there is no transition from one surface to another and your eye can`t tell which surface material is higher and which is lower.

Another example: you have created an archipelago of pirate islands with our hex map editor, but again, as with many other hex map editors, the textures are simply fitted into hexes so there are no coasts or beaches that go neatly under the water surface.

With the texture blendings editor, you can create any kind of pattern for blending textures — no need to create a whole array of tiles and program the logic of their placement. Just create a blending pattern and use it wherever you like — on the battle map or on the global map of your world!

Editor Description

The blending editor is an overlay application that is always at hand, so you can add and edit texture blendings while creating maps. All changes will be applied to the current and all your maps at once.

We have tried to make the editor as simple and intuitive as possible and, as with the texture editor, it has the familiar layout of left panel, central canvas and right panel.

Depending on the mode you select, the central canvas changes its configuration:

On the central canvas there are 5 layers for each mode, with fixed levels of transparency; clicking on a layer will activate the editing mode for that layer.

It is worth noting the red guide lines. Below we will describe the class of curve points, which can on-ly move along these lines.

In selection mode you can select lines and points, and in modification mode you can add new points and delete curves or lines.

Please note that when the curve editor is activated, additional controls are displayed in the mouse con-trol area.

Layers cannot be re-ordered, their order is fixed.

Editing curves

Layer editing is based on the curve editing system, but unlike the RPG map editor, here the curves are composite, i.e. the curves can be made up of an unlimited number of segments, so additional functions will be available.

In contrast to hexagonal map editor, in the blending editor curves are initially created with anchor points on them. Therefore, we can edit only existing curves, but this does not limit our editing options in any way. Once you have selected a layer, you will have two tools available.

  • Deleting curves
    unlike in the RPG map editor and the hex map editor, there is no separate button for deleting curves in the current application. To delete a curve, simply switch to Modify mode and right-click on any curve you wish to delete.
  • While editing a curve, the baseline will be marked in a special colour on the central canvas of the blending editor and you can change the curve drawing mode to : straight line, quadratic curve и cubic curve.

The curve has two types of controls:

Reference lines and anchor points

The blending editor requires reference lines along which fixed anchor points will move. This is done to eliminate the chance of creating a blending of irregular shape, because it will be inconvenient if for some reason a square in the RPG map editor will not have a centre, or a hex in the hexagonal map editor will be missing a part.

In the first iteration of this app there were no reference lines and points, and we encountered various oddities when creating blendings.

Conclusion

The texture blending editor may not be the most important program in our cloud ecosystem, but it can be quite useful in some cases. We have spent a fair amount of time developing it. We hope that it will prove useful in developing your hex maps or adventure maps for your teams.

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