Eleblend, as you might have guessed, blends textures, bump maps and specularity maps based upon an input grayscale image. In the past, this was a manual process that could take dozens of hours per image. To get started, provide a grayscale image or a digital elevation map from the US Geological Survey. It's essentially a filter for determining how the textures will blend. If needed, you can adjust the histogram of the input image so placement is easier.

Just choose a texture to load and adjust the slider (blue arrows) to determine how it's painted. Notice the "Resize %" gives you the power to resize images on the fly to create a consistent scale. The "To Higher/Lower" percentages gives immediate feedback as you move the slider showing what percentage of the image will be affected by the current slider location. Grain frequency and amplitude add noise to the transitions to make the blend more natural.

A few seconds later, a perfectly blended texture from input textures you provide. Don't like it? Just tweak a slider and you're ready to render again.

Imagine the time you'd spend manually creating the images above and then having to create another one for winter and fall. While you're at it, multiply that time by two if you're going to create a blended bump map or specularity map.

And finally, geometry extruded from the grayscale image with new texture applied.

Since you'll be using seamless textures as source data for Eleblend, it's useful to have some post processing options to prevent visible tiling.

	Another variation with slightly different textures
Hueshifting from a grayscale image
	Darkening from a grayscale image
And texture overlays for placing a texture on relatively flat surfaces
	Eleblend can also "age" your texture collection. If you have a texture with a matching bump map, it can blend in a dirt or dust texture to give images a weathered look. In the samples shown, a flat beige and hunter green image was used. On the left is the original texture with Eleblend's output on the right. Note the dusty appearance of the bricks and the moss in the crevices of the stucco. None of these additions were manually painted on the image. These painstaking details were blending in a few seconds in Eleblend. If you don't have a matching bump map, you can quite often just create a grayscale image of the texture needed.

Eleblend also contains a billboard utility called Treeline. It uses existing TGA images and creates a single image containing copies of the chosen textures. Essentially, it's a batch copy-paste process that does some mirroring and other effects to make a more natural treeline with minimum textures. Treeline gives you lots of control over how many "layers" of trees appear in the canopy, resizing per layer, and brightness adjustments along the way to give the illusion of a canopy darkening trees further back.

Relative sizing makes it easy to mix and match images that are of different scales. Imagine a tree image at 100x100 but then a closeup of grass at 100x100. Resizing makes it easy, breezy, beautiful.

You can hueshift textures to get a good mix of color variations. One word describes performing all of these painstaking, time consuming, manual operations in Photoshop: "not very much fun!"

Here's a tiny image generated with the Treeline utility. Sorry it's so small but the trees are property of Marlin Studios and I'm not allowed to redistribute.