So I made a nice cave model in blender.
I managed to import it into esenthel, and apply a material to it.

But what I'd really like to do is use the material 'painting' options that I can use with terrains.

Is it possible? I know that Blender can do it, via vertex painting.
For example: http://odedge.com/ut-3-tutorials/tutoria...ex-colors/
Is it possible to do this directly in Esenthel? I'd prefer to avoid using Blender as much as possible

Alternatively, is there another way to make caves? Perhaps using two terrain tiles on top of each other in order to simulate the ceiling AND floor of a cave?

i think you can only paint on the terrain, not models.

hrrrm, that's a shame :/

But would Esenthel support the technique mentioned in http://odedge.com/ut-3-tutorials/tutoria...ex-colors/ ?

It seems to map one texture to the red channel, another texture to the blue channel and another texture to the green channel. Then it uses vertex painting to blend the three textures together (multitexturing?) You can therefore apply multiple textures to a single mesh, without breaking up the mesh or ending up with a single enormous texture file.

It basically allows you to achieve the same effect as with the terrain editor

Looking at the very helpful wiki at http://www.esenthel.com/wiki/index.php?title=Material there doesn't seem to be a way to make a texture correspond to a particular colour. So am I right in saying this technique is not supported by Esenthel?

Sorry if that's a stupid question, I'm a relative newbie to 3D, a complete newbie to Esenthel and am still evaluating the engine (so don't have all the documentation available)

i get Error 404 - Not Found. did the page move?

Regarding your previous question, you cannot place 2 terrain tiles on top of one another - the engines terrain is basically a mesh generated from a 2d heightmap and because it's a heightmap, no 1 point (pixel) on the map can have a different y position. This will change soon though, he will add in voxel terrain-which will allow caves and what not, it's on the road map.

No sorry, the problem was a combination of the forum's URL parsing and my copying and pasting the truncated URL. I've corrected my above posts. The correct URL is:
http://odedge.com/ut-3-tutorials/tutoria...ex-colors/

Voxel terrain sounds like it would have a huge positive impact on my production process, and would be an enormous plus if Esenthel offered it. But it looks like it's a looooong way down the roadmap. I'm wondering if it'll be ready before I need to make up my mind as to what game engine to use.

(Being able to start the engine without the GPU is also essential to what I'm doing. On the plus side, that's right at the top).

There's another tutorial regarding what I'm trying to achieve, here:
http://www.hourences.com/tutorials-vtx-blending/

All I really want to know is whether the engine supports this "blending" of two textures on a single mesh.

It must on some level, take a look at the Vertex Paint mode when editing a skeleton. It blends Red/Blue/Green and everything in between so support of this just with textures would be a very nice feature in future.

This is actually a very good idea as it would pretty much remove the need to texture models in separate programs.

Well, I was able to produce the texture blending effect in blender by using stencils.

A single material uses three textures:
1) The top texture
2) A black and white image that defines transparency over the first texture
3) The bottom texture

The second texture dictates where the top texture is shown and where the bottom texture is shown.

However, it seems that when the mesh and material are exported from blender and imported into Esenthel, that Esenthel cannot handle the multiple textures.

Maybe you can render a diffuse map inside of Blender so that you get 1 texture that you can apply in Esenthel?

I thought a diffuse map was only used for defining how light reflected off the surface of a mesh?

If that's the case, I'm not sure I see how it could be used to blend two textures together on a single mesh.

No, a diffuse map is a texture defining the appearance of a mesh. If you render a diffuse map of your mesh in Blender, it should give you 1 texture that you can use to put onto your mesh in Model Editor. It'll essentially be a flattened image of the 2 textures + the alpha map you used with the stencil.

This may help: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Ma...der/Passes

Okay, I think I see what you're suggesting here.

(As a side point, it seems that in some 3D packages, diffuse actually does refer to the texture that defines how light is reflected off the surface of a mesh. However, its more common use, as you say, is to define the appearance of the mesh)

Anyhow, with regards to your suggestion, my cave area is large. At the moment, I tile a seamless 2048x2048 texture across my area. I have to repeat it at least 5 times before it looks respectable. To try and reduce the obvious repetition and make the area look a bit more interesting, I want to use multitexturing. The effect is that with only two 2048x2048 textures (and a stencil), the area *appears* to be a single enormous texture.

I could produce a single diffuse map for the entire area. But then I'd end up with a single 10240x10240 texture (ouch).

Of course, I could scale that back to 2048x2048. But then I'm back to the same problem - I have to tile the texture to make it high quality and then the repetition is obvious.

Why don't you split up the cave into several pieces and UV map it.. so you can add very nice detail to it with Gimp/PS... using a very large single texture looks kinda boring..

It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how easy it would be.
My cave is irregular. Splitting it up into several models would be fairly straightforward, but organising the UV maps so that the joins were seamless would be very difficult.

Unless there's some technique for doing this that I'm not aware of?

Well you don't need to, you can use props for that to cover it up... adding smaller stones/plants/some kind of an ancient item or whatever to it... thats how you can solve that problem