Changeing airfield-textures on the Marianas WW-IIiana

[PeeJott17]

Hi folks.

The idea of changing the airfield-textures of the WWII Marianas Map is to have a map that fits better into that 1960's look of south-east-asia.

Map is pretty good regarding anything else, but sand-runways with Jets on them just seems wrong.

So we would like to go a few steps here but would start with:

1. Exchange the airfield-textures of the WWII Version with the textures of the previous Version  (tarmac runways And taxiways).

2. Change those colors a bit to have a more "used" and bleached-out look.

The problem is, there are no full AF-Textures but textures that look like this (yes, those are not airports, but you get the idea): 

If one or two of you wonderful people could shed some light, as to how we might progress here, that would be just awesome, since there are Sone nicely modded textures for maps out there which leads me to the solution, that this problem has been solved already

Just copying, renaming and Posting the textures from the more modern map did not cut it...it just led to a "frozen" System...

Any help would be appreciated.

 

 

[PeeJott17]

Alrighty. After some testing there is (at least for my limited knowledge) no short way of changing airfield-textures for the WW-II Marianas-Map.
Of course, there will be a possibility for someone more talented in that department than me, but it will need messing with the original textures and may be the pallets as well and I have less then zero ideas how to do that. And having no clue it will need a lot of trial and error. So if there is somebody out there who knows that stuff, a little "heads-up" would be appreciated as to how those things are "read and understood" and how it would be possible to change the appearance.

 

Cheers,

PeeJott.

[Meringo]

marianas and marianasWWII are using a more sophisticated version of the splatmap-technology.

The idea is to blend multiple materials together.
the materials are made up of textures themselves. they consist of color+alpha, NormalMap, MetalnessRoughness-map.
(the materials are in the CloseupTextures files.)

the splatmaps are instructions where to put a piece of material and how much to blend it with the others.
a splatmap is 4 separate greyscale-maps packed into a RGBA dds file. (A=Alpha)
There is a pool of materials available. (36 for marianasWWII)
4 channels means only 4 materials to mix together.

Out of the pool of 36 materials only 4 specificly selected materials can be used at a time for a splatmap.
The mapdesigner decides which 4 would be a good mix for a certain region/asset and "bakes" this decision into the mesh-data.

colorchannel mapping in a splatmap:
R for Material 1
G for Material 2
B for material 3
A for material 4

The position and the brightness of the pixels in a channel dictate how much the material contributes to the endresult.

For the WWII-airfields the 4 selected materials are  soil, leaves, shoreline, earth  i think.
You could mess with the soil and earth materials in the closseuptextures, but i think they are used heavily in other assets too. but its worth a try.

The mask-textures have also all 4 channels in use, even if it looks like the green-channel is the only one, if you look closely, there is data in R and B too.
The G-channel intensity changes the brightness of the material-mix and in combination with the gradients in the palette-texture the hue and color-saturation i think.
The alpha-channel definitely dictates how the whole thing blends itself with the textures underneath the field.
The R and B channels i dont know at the moment.

the airfield-NormalMaps are for the macro-details for the further-away-view bumpy-ness appearance of course. if more closeup, the materials have their own normalmaps and add their own micro-detail.

[PeeJott17]

@Meringothat is an awesome explanation.

Thanks a lot.

Wow. Just really, really cool. 

How did you know which Material is used?

Let's say, we can't get a good solution turning the runways to a tarmac grey, I've found, that by changeing the green map we can get rid of the scratches in the earth giving it a smooth look.

Is there a possibility to change the Layout? Going from this "feathered out" style to a more straight-style with clearer edges for the runway? It does not look to be 3d but pure texture (the Airfield I mean)

I guess if we start messing with the splatmap the result will be...well...pretty messy? Or can we find out which "grey" is which Material?

Big-Big thanks for your help.

Cheers,

PeeJott

Edited June 29 by PeeJott17

[Meringo]

The agana-airfield i checked has soil, leaves, shoreline, earth - i painted highly visible colored numbers on the closeup-texures to find out.
I assumed the other airfields use the same set of 4, but as it turns out - a lot of airfields have their own individual set of 4 materials.

Of course you can change the layout - that is what the splatmaps are for.
Dont look at a splatmap as a colorful image, see it as 4 separate black&white images.

If you use gimp load your splatmap, go to Menu Colors, Components, Decompose
then color-mode to RGBA and you get 4 separate black&white images (which you can later Recompose back).
Each one of the 4 images represents a material.
The intensity/weight of the material is done gradually from none (black) to fully visible (white)

 

There is actually 3D information in the materials-normalmap. for example if you have 2 materials one of them stones and the other sand - a high intensity of the stone and a lower intensity of the sand will let the stone peek through the sand in a very convincing way.

Play around with the 4 black&white images a bit  and do some test-patterns/gradients - It’ll click, and you’ll get your head around it.

There is another problem, though. The airfields are baked in the clipmaps as well. Clipmaps are for further away rendering, looking down from higher up or in the distance. the clipmaps are not editable (as far as i know). they are pre-rendered by the mapdesigner.
so if you have a wildly differing airfield-layout with very different colors, it will pop in very visibly when it transitions from the clipmap to the altered splatmap-based render.

[Meringo]

Correction: there are 5 Materials available at a time. The splatmap Alpha-channel controls the blend like a crossfader between Material 4 and Material 5. You can see it as a base-layer that is always there.
The other R,G,B channels are on top of that.

[PeeJott17]

@Meringobig thanks again.

when I load the splatmap into paint.net it gives me the channels as "real" colors not as black and white.

sadly, Affinity-Photo, my go to texture editor, does not like dds... if I convert to png the info gets lost.

Which Format keeps the Infos so I can convert back and forth? (Tif may-be)

Regarding airfields:

My goal now would be to straighten the runways out to have clearer edges.

If possible go from Sand to a more grey'ish color.

A lot of stuff to do...

Btw. I saw textures (in the closeup-texture zip) that had no texture at all? That was astounding...

[Meringo]

As soon you have to use an alpha channel/transparency, paint.net is useless.

I dont know affinity-photo, just googled how to separate all the channels... urg way too complicated.
If you convert it into png or tiff, then there is this premlultiplied alpha stuff and sRGB you have to care about.... all more confusing stuff.
None of these programs are really made for this stuff, they all treat it like images. you wanna treat it like special data, unaltered with sRGB and transparency nonsense those programs all imply.
That even includes gimp, which i recommend because it has a fast way of seperating the 4 channels. using it is tolerable to get an idea how all this stuff works.

If you wanna do it properly, you would use something like blender, where you have total control over the texture-channels, and you can practically emulate what it would look like in dcs, including normalmaps and material-properties.
I use it to explore why in dcs things look the way they do.

The reason you "see" nothing in some closeup-textures is that the Alpha-channel is used for Grass-intensity/Grasslength. So if a Material has no grass, it will be transparent in an image-viewer/editor.