Abstract

Texture splatting is a terrain texturing technique that has been used in computer games for the last decade [Bloom 2000]. Although its low footprint and GPU-friendliness makes it an attractive candidate for outdoor environments, the use of linear interpolation to blend between different terrain textures can produce "fading" artefacts at transitions. For example, Figure 1 (left) illustrates a brick texture that blends linearly towards an underlying dirt texture. The bricks themselves fade towards increasing translucency, detracting from the plausibility of the scene. A more desirable approach would aim to eliminate or reduce these artefacts by allowing certain features to protrude through the surface of underlying terrain textures. Hardy and McRoberts [2006] reduce these transitional artefacts by using blend maps to emphasize the importance of certain texels within a given terrain texture. Whilst the technique is an improvement over linear blending, the issue of fading artefacts remains (albeit less prominently).