Ground Painting

One of the final stages of the project was to create a ground for the scene. For this I decided to try vertex painting. This is where instead of applying just one texture to a mesh, you're able to paint between two textures by applying the textures onto the vertices of the mesh. However, for this to work a mesh can need many vertices. Since this was just a plane mesh it was only a few subdivisions higher adding around 12 vertices.

This is the layout of the material for vertex painting. In this I have scaled two textures to the desired size and plugged them into the same lerp. The alpha point of the lerp node is filled by a vertex color node which is what allows the painting between verts.

 Here you can see a blend of the two different textures, one a cracked earth pattern, the other a sand/gravel texture. Also in the image are black dots. These indicate the location of the vertices and hence where the paint brush will apply the selected texture.

Finally, here is a preview of the ground in the scene.