As basic as this might be, I was curious how to go about texturing a rendered heightmap by hand. Think of it like this. I have an editor open with my heightmap terrain loaded. I simply “paint” the terrain with a brush, save it and load it when rendering the terrain in-game. I’m looking for how I can texture a terrain how I want it, and not in some procedural way. Think of it like a height map for textures (I doubt a literal “texture map” would be economical size-wise. Or would it…?).
Excuse my obvious ignorance here, I’m just trying to understand how to get into this whole thing one step at a time, and I don’t have any experience working with 3D.
What you are looking for is a tool to build terrain. On production systems such as Crytek, this is done with special tools and multiple layers of textures.
Panda 3D supports the low levels of this such as multiple textures and shaders but it does not have an automated tool to do this since there is no common way to do this with and without shaders.
I could be wrong but I do not believe that any Panda 3D level editors allows you edit and paint this within the game engine.
However, as I mentioned above, this can be done manually. You can paint these layers of textures in a program like photoshop and override the heighmap generator’s textures with your own.
@OP: I’m a bit confused on what you’re trying to ask. Do you mean that you want to add the ability to realtime edit the heightmap? Or its textures? Do you want to know how to implement alpha mapping?