Someone in the Lightwave forums showed me a good way to randomize a texture so it doesn't look tiled over large surfaces. The problem is that this is a native Lightwave method and uses the texture editor with several layers stacked up, the last one uses the blending mode "Texture Displacement", which after reading the manual I don't think it's available in Octane.
I uploaded here two of the screenshots this very useful user made for me, so you get an idea of what I'm talking about:
I tried to replicate this in Octane nodes for over an hour without success. I used everything I could find in the manual and that I could think of myself, including:
- CosineMix texture mixing two grass textures, using a procedural ridged fractal to drive the amount
- Same but with turbulence for input
- Tried the same but using the mix texture
- Gradient texture using either fractal or turbulence for input texture and the grass textures for start and end textures
Obviously I didn't just tried the defaults and gave up, I played with the settings, scaled both textures and procedurals, rotated them, and tweaked lots of settings. While this method makes the pattern a little less noticeable, it's still evident. I want to achieve what this guy did with the texture displacement blending mode in Lightwave, is there a way to do that? If not, is there a way to surface a large object in which the textures won't look tiled? Think of it as what the Lightwave instance generator does in surface and random mode, where it scatters the instanced object all over the place and you can set a min and max scale, offset, rotation, etc. I'm looking for a way to do that, but with a texture or two, because if I just use instanced grass over the whole surface I need the grass on, it takes 6 minutes to load into the GPU, and about the same time to render without too much noise.
Thanks!