Strange Terrain Paint Issue (Martine's Multipack O__o)

[Sococo.]

hi guys!

i finally stopped reading tuts and dug in here. started sculpting then found the sea/sky/light parameter thread and have been obsessing ever since! :lovestruc

anyway i decided to stop messing with colour ramps for a bit and organize/pick my terrain paints. for some reason when i try and use martine's lovely mega pack, they don't seem to like me setting the falloff and opacity low. which obviously i want to do! i'm a digital painter so this stuff comes pretty naturally to me but i'm stumped here. i've attached some pics below but i'll try and explain it better.

i like the falloff on absolute 0 for this. opacity i like to keep between 3-10 or so. however when i try and use martine's, they just don't even work XD. then if i start upping the opacity (do not want), it starts to show up but in a sparse almost pixelly fashion until i set opacity really high. then it's like SPLAT here's your terrain in massive chunky glory. really do not want.

this doesn't happen for the other terrains i've downloaded. as you can see in the screenies that texture on the mountain is another custom that does not behave this waywhich makes no sense. i wanna use martine's cause it's the most comprehensive clever little set but meh. :/

ideas? anyone else experience this? thanks!

[auntielynds]

I don't know if the info I have will be new to you or not since you've said you're a digital painter. I'm only familiar with caw, so I don't know if it's similar to what you're used to. I'll explain it how I understand it to be, though, and hopefully it will help. I'm sure there are others out there who have a better overall understanding of it than I.

I imagine each layer of paint I add to my palette as a layer of paper on the surface of the world. The bottom layer in the world is the top texture in your paints texture box, the default grass unless you've changed it. Each texture after that one is another sheet of paper sitting on top of the one below it. So say you spray down texture #5 all over, then want to come back in on top with texture #3, the program will erase texture # 5 where you lay down #3 creating some strange effects.

It also could be caused by the opacity, or alpha channels of the texture itself, but I'm not as familiar with how that works enough to know. I hope this helps a little, also read this for a bit more info. Create A World - Terrain Painting Tips (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=430231) by Simsample.

[simsample]

Yes, that's because some of Martine's textures have an alpha channel, so parts are transparent. This means that when you use a low brush pressure you will not see the parts which are alpha'd out, so you get the pattern of the visible texture only. This makes those textures behave differently to solid textures.

Alphas are pretty useful though, for example if you look at the EA textures you will see that there are pebble textures that show the underneath texture through the gaps, and flowers that can be sprayed over another texture to look like they are scattered in your grass/ mud/ whatever.