Guild of Writers

Materials with a "detail" texture layer are useful in correcting textures that are blurry or pixilated when your avatar (or more specifically, your active camera) get close to them.

This is particularly noticeable with large areas (walls, floors, terrains) that you don't want to be horrible from a distance (to repetitive) - or close up (blurry/pixellated). Good UV mapping helps but, alone, cannot stop this from happening with large surfaces.

Using a "detail" texture layer solves this by slowly replacing/merging/blending one of the material's texture layers into another one, in real time, as the camera gets closer to the object. As the camera gets closer to the material, the amount of blending gets more intense until you eventually see ONLY the "close up" texture layer. Basically, the opacity of the "close up" texture changes from zero to 100% as the camera gets closer, and it does so in real-time. This effect was available using Pyprp and can now also be used using Korman 0.09. The main difference between using this blending type in Korman and Pyprp is that your textures images do NOT need an alpha channel in Korman. In fact, images with NO alpha give the best results.

You can use the same .png image file for both the "distance" texture and the "detail" texture (which this tutorial does) although there is nothing to stop you from using completely different images for "far away" and "close up". However for this tutorial we are going to keep it simple and use the same image.

(to be continued ....)