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Terrain and Water Alpha Blend by Cornrow Wallace
This is fairly basic, so it should be easy to follow.
First off, create a Simple Terrain Mesh. If you already know how, skip the next paragraph and continue. If you don't, read on.
Creating your Simple Terrain Mesh
Draw out a brush in your 2d grid, dimensions don't matter, neither does texture.
Now select your brush if it is not already selected (Shift + left click), and click on Patch > Simple Terrain Mesh. The amount of verts you set will be determined by how you want your terrain to look. For a more rounded look, you'll add more verts. However, do not create all of your meshes at a high number or you will get serious errors when you try to compile. For this example, I'll go with 3 x 5.
Expanding your terrain
Now that you have your first mesh created, you're going to duplicate it. To do this, select it (Shit + left click), and press the Spacebar once. Drag your new mesh into place, aligning it with your original mesh.
Now repeat that step a few more times until you have a decent sized area to work with.
Manipulating your terrain height/depth - Method 1
There are two methods of doing this. The first being the easier way, which is to use the Advanced Patch Editing tool. To activate this tool, press the Y key. There are a few options you must have set properly here. Check "Paint Height". Uncheck "Allow soft selection on unhighlighted patches". Check "Height".
Now, when you move your mouse around in the 3d view, you'll notice a circle outline, which will also highlight your verts as it passes over them. When you hold the Alt key and left click on a vert, it will rise up. When you hold the Alt key and right click, the vert will lower. You can adjust how fast this happens by raising or lowering the Amplitude bar in the Advanced Patch Editing window. If you'd like the circle to be larger, hence catching more verts at a time, increase the Outer Radius bar in the Advanced Patch Editing window.
So now paint some height using the above method. I have my settings on:
Outer Radius: 176
Amplitude: 2
In the above imagine, I lowered the terrain slighting to the right of the mouse, and elevated it to the left. The lowered area will be for water a little later. Press the Y key again to get rid of the Advanced Patch Editing window. And that is method 1.
Manipulating your terrain height/depth - Method 2
This is my preferred method, mainly because I work with very small vert amounts for my meshes, though it takes longer and is not as easy.
With your meshes selected, press the V key to show all your verts. From here, you can Left click + hold a vert and drag it wherever you like. The catch is, when you raise a vert from a mesh, the connecting mesh will no longer be aligned, so all verts must be connected. To connect two verts, select one (left click), then hold the Ctrl key and select the other, and with the Ctrl key still selected, press the K key and both verts will join. The order of which you select the verts will determine which one moves to which. For example, if I click on "vert 1", then hold Ctrl and click on "vert 2" and connect them, "vert 2" will move to "vert 1" because it was selected last. And that is method 2.
Alpha Blending
Now we need to texture our meshes. Pick a texture that you want to be subtle, like dirt. I am going to use the dirt@oldpacked_large texture in the Normandy > Ground folder.
You may notice that after you texture your meshes, the texture seems to look very repetative, not natural looking at all. To correct this, select all your meshes and press the S key to bring up the Surface Inspector.
In this window, you'll see an area labled "Texturing". In that area, under "Patch", click on the "Cap" button, then the "ok" button at the bottom left.
Now our texture is very neat & uniform.
The next step is to duplicate all of your terrain. Select everything, and press the Spacebar once. Line it up perfectly in your 2d grid, and do not deselect anything.
Now we have to choose an alpha texture. You can spot alpha textures by their white outline in the texture window. Anything with a white outline is an alpha texture. I am going to use a_grass1a from the Normandy > ground folder.
To alpha blend, bring up the Advanced Patch Editing window again by pressing the Y key. This time, we are going to select the following:
Check Flatten
Uncheck Allow soft selection for unhighlighted patches
Check Alpha
What you are going to do is actually erase parts of the alpha texture where you want to see your dirt texture, giving it a very smooth transition from grass to dirt. So hold the Alt key and left click and drag your mouse around to erase the areas where you want to see dirt, most likely in the lowered area where your water will be. For this you are better off going with a smaller Outer Radius & a lower Amplitude. I am going to use:
Outer Radius: 96
Amplitude: 1
You should note that while you are alpha blending, the areas you have blended will appear redish while the alpha texture is selected.
And after you're done alpha blending, press the Esc key to deselect everything, and take a look at your alpha blended terrain.
Now the hard part is done.
Adding water
This is very easy. Open your Common textures folder, and find the water texture, be sure you don't accidentally use water_clip, as they are not the same thing. Once you have selected the water texture, draw out a brush in your 2d window.
Chances are your water brush will be set a bit too high and not exactly where you wanted it, so you can move it around and resize it to the size you want in your 3d view. For this example, I lowered my terrain in the first step specifically for this part. I am going to lower my water brush a bit beneath my terrain so it will only show in the dip. Press the Esc key to deselect your water brush when you are done.
After you have that all sorted out, you'll need to choose what type of water you'd like to use. Open your sfx textures folder. Quite a few of these textures are water, but not all, so make sure you read the texture name. For this example, I am going to go with the mp_italywater texture, which I am using in my current map, and is also used in Barbarossa and Italy. Before you go ahead and texture anything with your water texture, you only need to texture the top of your water brush for it to work properly. To do this, hold down the Ctrl and Shift keys, and left click once on the top of your water in your 3d view, this will select only the top face of your water brush. With that selected, left click once on your desired water texture. And now you have your water.
And that is that. Time to write up this tutorial: 1hr 16m - appreciate it.
Good luck!
