How in the world do splatmaps / texture maps work *Solved*

I swear they're driving me up the wall, they seemingly refuse to work sometimes and never line up in terms of rotation.
I hope these more obscure parts of the editor are cleaned up because they tend to act really funky when you try to use them, it would be very useful if there was some way of previewing the output and a label for black and white channels.

 

I was referring to the maps that you use while importing terrain to specify where you want certain materials, I got it to work although it's pretty finicky and the method I used was very weird and probably not the intended way of going about things.

 

The way they work is fairly simple:

1. Figure out the general idea of how you want your map to look
2. Sacrifice a lamb to @LJFHutch
3. Wait 5 days and 12 minutes
4. Give up and do it the old fashioned way

 

1. generate splatmaps
2. realize they don't work
3. bang your head against a wall all day
4. take a shower and think about it
5. try the most stupid solution ever that doesn't even make sense and is probably impossible to do again
6. hope you never have to do it again

 

I could definitely point you in the right direction and with some luck even get it work, I saw that you use world machine and you can literally just use the sediment channel or erosion and output it as a bitmap and then convert that to png, rotate it 180 then flip it across the x axis.
If you want to do more then one material that's when things start getting real odd and janky.

 

I thought world machine exported some pretty high quality stuff, I use blender since its free but its a nightmare making anything high resolution and with the amount of memory and cpu it can use at times I doubt it's good for my pc.

 

If anyone is wondering how to do this I think I found a solution that will work almost all the time.
Just like the devs mentioned somewhere you need to rotate 180 degrees then flip across the x axis, the next thing is to make sure your image is a 8 bit grayscale.
When importing and setting up your layers you may need to use the first layer after each layer but you might be able to just add each layer without this step, I need to do some more testing before I get a definitive answer.
Once the import is finished you will have a few different warning materials that you can change to match the materials you want.
*I do not recommend specifying materials before importing the terrain as this may cause the importer to delete layers*

 

Macro's out of World Machine are indeed blurry at 4K but in T3D they aren't meant to be anywhere but the diffuse slot in terrain materials. The good
stuff happens with the detail and normal map slots. You can also use the WM macro in the terrain macro slot to add intensity to what the diffuse is doing.
Rendering out the normal map for the macro and using it in the appropriate slot helps with longer distance fidelity and shadowing in some instances. The T3D lighting situation is quite piss right now so it can cause the macro normal to do absolutely nothing.