Using Merge Maps to Create Realistic Blood Splatter in UDK - Intermediate Level

Skills Required :  

       -Basic Knowledge of Photoshop 

       -Basic knowledge of Unreal Material Editor

Here is the package and TGA image that I created:  Blood.zip

Blood splatter is from CG textures.

 

So it is likely that you will get a file with a white background.  Thats quite useless for making a translucent material in UDK.  Cardinal sin #1 for decals is a white background.  The reason is when you try to ad an alpha channel to it, you still get remnants of white showing through the semi-transparent parts of the blood.

Like this:

So we need to get it on a black background before we create our merge map so we don't get those white artifacts.  We will only need grayscale information in the end, so its quite simple.

First of all, select the layer with your blood splatter on it.  Then go to Image>Adjustments>Invert or ctrl+I.  

That will give you this: 

Now that you have a black background, you can go to Select>Color Range.  

Swarm Success!

As some of you may know, I work at the Systems Office at SCAD's Montgomery Hall.  Today I got Swarm (UDK lightmass "job distribution) to work on the school servers.  It was actually pretty simple once you know what to do.  The hard part is going to be getting it to run in the background while computers are idle.  That will be my Spring Break project along with installing March UDK and most likely Cryengine 3 (its actually on the to-do list that my boss wrote up).  Anyways if you have any questions about setting up swarm on a school network, feel free to ask.