Texture appearing checkered on displacements

[VelvetFistIronGlove]

In the map I'm currently working on, I've got some displacements textured with nature/blendrockgroundwall004. I've painted alpha on the walkable parts so they look like ground, and it all looks fine in Hammer. But when I build the map, all the alpha-painted parts have a strange checkerboard pattern all over, like this:

I'm at a loss as to what could be causing this. Any ideas?

 

[Snipergen]

This looks awesome to be honest. Sombody on steam forums had the same problem.

Solution 1: recompile
Solution 2: build cubemaps

I searched for the original thread but i only founr similar ones;. i hope one of these works.

 

[VelvetFistIronGlove]

Yeah, I'd tried rebuilding the cubemaps, but it didn't change anything.

It turns out that some of the alpha blend textures show this problem: http://tf2maps.net/showthread.php?t=128 -- if I change the texture I'm using it should be OK.

I might need to make my own blend textures anyway, because I'm not sure any of the defaults have the combinations of dirt with rock/gravel/grass that I want.

Edit: I'll try and find out why this texture does this, although I'm guessing it might be a developer feature to help highlight overly stretched/squashed polygons in the displacement.

 

[VelvetFistIronGlove]

Found it. It turns out that this is the result of a missing bump map for the dirt half of the material. The vmt specifies "$bumpmap2" "Nature/rockground001_bump-ssbump", but the real bump map name is Nature/rockground001_height-ssbump.

 

[Armadillo of Doom]

That's good to know lol. Might I ask what you're working on? Looks pretty sweet so far

 

[VelvetFistIronGlove]

Might I ask what you're working on?

You can do better than ask: you can see!

 

[Snipergen]

Great, another good mapper

Some parts look good, other parts need more details, but i guess you are just releasing for a bit playtest right?

 

[VelvetFistIronGlove]

Yeah. There's piles of work to be done, but the layout and props for cover that I'd planned are there. It's not even a beta, because it's not ready for general public testing yet.

 

[Earl]

Found it. It turns out that this is the result of a missing bump map for the dirt half of the material. The vmt specifies "$bumpmap2" "Nature/rockground001_bump-ssbump", but the real bump map name is Nature/rockground001_height-ssbump.

How would you go about fixing this? How do you edit the .vmt?

 

[VelvetFistIronGlove]

The .vmt is a text file that specifies the properties of the material (whereas the .vtf is just the image)

You wouldn't edit the original .vmt; rather you'd extract it from the .gcf, give it a new name, and put it in a tf\materials\your_mapname\ folder. Edit your copy to fix the error, and you'll be able to use your new material in Hammer and in the game.

You can find all the gory details of the .vmt file at http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Material