Prevent ground-textures from taking on the colour/hue of the satmap?

[McNools]

Like the title says, is there a way to prevent the ground-textures from taking on the colour/hue of the satmap? For instance, if you have brown muddy fields with quite a lot of green grass-clutter on them, you'd want it to look rather green from a distance. However, the ground-textures take on the colour of the satmap, so that what should be brown is instead an unnatural green colour. Is there a way to force it to stick to the textures colour? I imagine that this might be done using the .rvmat files, but I haven't been able to figure it out.

[phaeden]

I was not able to get it to work - I ultimately changed my satmap.

[Jakerod]

The only thing I can think of is changing the ground texture to be a color that when mixed with the sat layer makes the correct color. Not entirely sure its possible but it makes sense to me. It might create problems though where different colors give it some other weird color.

[Rip31st]

The satmap is one color. The terrain mid level texture is another. The ground texture is another. So to get the all the same, effect from varied distances. It won't work. Simply because the satmap represents the entire map, whereas the mid level represents only a small area.

If you hop in a helo from the ground, you see the ground texture color enhanced by the satmap at the surface. Lift off and climb upward and the ground color changes to the mid level texture. Which in most cases is a neutral color like beige or light green. Kinda sucks that way because if you elect to leave out the mid level texture out of the config, any terrain vertices you edited after importing the terrain into visitor show as transparent textures from a distance. Big blocks everywhere!

Best best is to edit the satmap manually. I export out the terrain to imaging software and use the terrain as an overlay with the satmap in a layer to make sure sandy beaches aren't blue.

[McNools]

Thanks for the replies, I've desaturated the map a little to try and reduce the effect, it's better than nothing I suppose.

[Robster]

Hi MCN!

I think this is related to the way ArmA engine deals with those *_lco.paa files, I mean, these "layer color map" files are meant to be treated as you described above... "el efecto vaca"

I've found some tips about how to deal with it, which does not means in anyway that I really can do it properly...

Anytime you see a (ground) texture in Tex2view you'll notice that it tells you about the average color of the whole thing near the right bottom window corner... this info may allow you to index your own textures according to sat picture colors...
You could make a "sat pic mask" which is drawn according to your previously done index, I mean, where your average colors match the sat picture, so "cow effect" should be less noticed...

Another trick could be to lay some X% of an average sat color over a ground texture in PS... more or less the same thing... avoiding undesired/heavier transitions in overall colors... this trick is closer to desaturate tool which is also very handy IMO

More, all textures could be available as a Library indexed according average color, so mappers could use a "custom color palette" to paint grounds