I'm trying to create blends in the same way that Cyan appears to create them - that is, using a little 64x4 grayscale ramp. It's just so much more efficient than the alternatives.
I can make alpha blends with vertex painting, and I understand how stencils can be used to make blends between textures. I'm not wild about the idea of having a bunch of stencil textures hogging up my Age's resources though. From importing Cyan-made Ages in an older version of PyPRP, I got some hints about how they do it. It seems that rather than creating a new texture for each blend, they use the same grayscale ramp texture with a different UV map, essentially just mapping each UV to a different shade of gray. Efficient!
Is there an easy way to replicate this method in Blender+PyPRP? Assigning a greyscale tone to each vertex sounds like a job for vertex painting, but Blender uses vertex color maps at the mesh level, and this would need one at the material or texture level. I'm tempted to write a little python script to convert a grayscale vertex color map into UV coordinates, but I'm curious to know if there's a better way. Any tips or thoughts?
