Assembling Terrain Textures

This page will go over texture creation, focusing more on how the textures are assembled rather than producing them from scratch. There are a variety of different software that can create textures from scratch - such as Substance Designer or Quixel - but this isn't a guide on how to use those.

Prerequisites

Assembling Parallax textures requires you to know how to paste textures into image channels.

Photoshop can do this using the 'Channels' tab. For Gimp users, use "Colors -> Decompose -> RGBA", make your changes, then use "Colors -> Recompose" once you're done.

1. Surface Texture

This refers to the _SurfaceTexture parameter in the terrain config.

Assembling this texture is easy and requires your desired Albedo map and its associated Gloss map. Simply paste the gloss map into the Albedo map's alpha channel and you're done!

2. Normal Map

Non-Emissive Planets

Assembling this texture is extremely straightforward - you're already done! Make sure you save your normal map as DXT5_NM - Regular DXT5 heavily compresses the Red channel that normal maps rely on for horizontal information. DXT5_NM uses the green and alpha channels instead, which do not suffer quite so much - the difference in quality is massive.

Emissive Planets

Assembling this texture is quite simple, but for emissive planets you will sadly need to suffer the compression penalty for the entire planet. Take your emissive texture, greyscale it, and paste it into the alpha channel of your normal map. Done! You must save this as a DXT5.

3. Displacement Map

Open each displacement map for each texture this planet is going to use - this is assuming you have four (one for each altitude and one for the slopes). Create a new texture with the same resolution as your displacement maps, and do the following:

1. Paste the displacement map that corresponds to the Low texture set into the Red channel
2. Paste the displacement map that corresponds to the Mid texture set into the Green channel
3. Paste the displacement map that corresponds to the High texture set into the Blue channel
4. Paste the displacement map that corresponds to the Steep texture set into the Alpha channel

Then you're done with the displacement map!

4. Influence Map

I will go into a small amount of detail on how to create this one.

Most image editing software have a black-and-white filter that allows you to control how each colour is affected. This is incredibly useful for influence maps because there are some colours in the texture that you'll want to preserve, and others that you can just let the planet colour control.