Hi everyone! This is my first post here. I’ve been using panda3d for a couple months now and I’m in love with it. This and python are vastly easier to work with than C# and straight DirectX.
Anyway, here’s the deal. Our project uses a large-scale 3d tile map. I’m creating the map in 32x32 chunks as geom objects that get loaded and unloaded dynamically as you move around the map. This works fine. My question is on texturing the tiles. I’m sure the best answer will be “write a shader” (which is what I did in the C# incarnation of this project), but I want to see if I have other options too.
Because I’m loading 1024 tiles into a single geom object, I can’t set a different texture on each tile. So I pack my textures into a large template and use texture coordinates to address the specific texture I want on each tile. This works fine. The problem comes up when I want to blend 2 textures on a single tile. Let’s say both of my texture images are packed onto the same texture. I would need 2 sets of tex coords to address them. What about an alpha map? Can I use another packed texture of alpha maps with a third set of tex coords for that? Is there an easier way to achieve that kind of texture blending?
Like I said earlier, I’m fine with writing a shader to do this, I just want to see if there’s another way. Thanks for reading.