Texturing Issue (Overlapping / Brightness)

[Bengel]

Hey everyone, I've been using ASE for some time now and I'm still learning a lot but I have found one issue that I can't fix which is the reason I'm here. I'm currently working on a Planet shader and I'm trying to combine textures and heightmaps in order to mimic a Sea/Mainland/Mountains. The issue:

1. Don't blend that good together so they start overlapping instead of being like layered on top of each other without the blend.

2. (I think this is a fix, please correct me if I'm wrong) I increase the Scale(Brightness in this case) to try and somewhat layer the textures but then the texture gets super white on the top pieces. If this is the correct method for doing so, How Do I fix this?

Refference Image: https://imgur.com/a/opR9mZu

(Shader Made in the HDRP Unity Version 2018.3)

[Amplify_Borba]

Hello! I believe you should look into alternate ways of blending the textures, such as the Lerp, the Heightmap Texture Blend and the Layered / Summed / Weighted Blend nodes, rather than using Add / Multiply operations as they're not as flexible.

Also, the Saturate is very useful to limit your data's value range and prevent it from exceeding 1 or going below 0, which may produce artifacts.

[Bengel]

Hello! I believe you should look into alternate ways of blending the textures, such as the Lerp, the Heightmap Texture Blend and the Layered / Summed / Weighted Blend nodes, rather than using Add / Multiply operations as they're not as flexible.

Also, the Saturate is very useful to limit your data's value range and prevent it from exceeding 1 or going below 0, which may produce artifacts.

Thank you very much, I will look into it. Sorry for the many Questions I've been asking lately. I've really started learning to make shaders and ASE is the Perfect tool for me. My knowledge has already expanded a lot and thanks to you I've learned a bit more.

Do you happen to have any advice on finding good tutorials / more in-depth explanations of the Asset? It's sometimes hard for me to understand what each node does, even though the wiki gives a good explanation of the place where you practice such nodes sometimes are still unclear to me.

Once again thank you very much!

[Amplify_Borba]

No problem, always happy to help!

For starters, I recommend looking into our Tutorials wiki page, where we share some videos of our own making and from the community as well. Examining the shader samples included in the package will also allow you to learn from their node setups and by further tweaking them.

It's important to keep in mind that the knowledge acquired is interchangeable between editors such as the Unreal Material Editor or similar node-based tools ( e.g. Shader Forge ), and given that ASE is based on common shader development standards, you can very well adapt tutorials and samples from other sources to our editor, especially UE4 tutorials.

For a more practical and in-depth look into shader development, I strongly recommend looking into a few Shader Development books, especially Alan Zucconi's tutorials ( starting with the Gentle Introduction to Shaders ) and his much praised Shaders and Effects Cookbook.