I feel like you seem to already understand things, but I'll show an example of how I might have approached the "problem" if it had been me. Perhaps it will give some ideas to someone. I hope the below pictures will display well enough for everyone, it should be possible to right click them and display only the images in a separate tab if necessary, depending on browser.
First a quick response to this:
linkster wrote: ↑August 23rd, 2022, 10:31 pmWhen everything is sharpness=0, the "size" of the alpha texture transition of the seam blend dictates how the seam blend looks. As soon as the edges are sharp, it seems like the spacing of the seam blend verts dictates how wide the seam blend transition is.
The way I see it, both the alpha texture transition and the spacing of verts always have an effect on how the seamblends end up looking, no matter what the sharpness, even though of course the sharpness also changes things. Even the distance to verts immediately outside the seamblend tend to have an effect unless the seamblend perimeter edges are sharp.
Example:
Ok so lets say I start with all edges at 0 like in the left half of the below picture. Just for example's sake I've selected APCD stock textures and one of the more complicated Alpha textures available in the APCD Add-On Downloads forum section called "01 AlphaGrass". Lets say this is the look I want for the final result.
But then lets say I want to sharpnen all edges to 1 like in the right half of the below picture. The seamblend between Rough and Fairway ends up looking "sharper" or "tighter" or whatever you want to call it.
- AlphaEx1.jpg (331.33 KiB) Viewed 3963 times
Lets say I dont like that, and that I want to do something about that, but I also still dont want to change the edges back to sharpness 0, and I dont want to move any verts either. I take the Alpha texture into Paint.Net (which is available for free), though most Image editing programs can be used. Alpha textures can be acquired as TGA files by using Links Extender (which is available here:
https://linkscorner.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=66 )
My goal is to "stretch out" the alpha to make it less tight. There are many ways to achieve this, in this example I do it by first re-sizing with the menu option Image > Resize... as seen on the left half of the picture below, then cropping the image back to the original size using the menu option Image > Canvas Size. In the Resize, Maintain Aspect Ratio needs to be un-checked, and I chose to widen it from 512 pixels wide to 900, which means I make it almost twice as wide. I still want the whole alpha transition to fit within 512 pixels wide, so I dont want to overdo it. Some Alpha textures can be trickier to work with in this regard, if their alpha transition already takes up a large part of the image to begin with.
- AlphaEx2.jpg (252.1 KiB) Viewed 3963 times
Then just save it as a TGA 32bit (in the same pixel dimensions it was originally, which for this Alpha texture was 512x512). I put a B before the original name, and I made it so you can see a small preview of them in the texture list in the right half of the picture below. Then just load it into the seamblend texture, and it now looks similar to the original look again (perhaps not identical, but Im just trying to show a concept), and edges are still at sharpness 1.
- AlphaEx3.jpg (259.35 KiB) Viewed 3963 times
I have been working on the next LIDAR tutorial on importing course terrains so that others can create LIDAR accurate masterpieces. They will likely curse me for the amount of mesh work necessary to seem blend the terrain 