Texture splatting

It works by applying an alphamap (also called a "weightmap" or a "splat map") to the higher levels, thereby revealing the layers underneath where the alphamap is partially or completely transparent.

The term was coined by Roger Crawfis and Nelson Max.

[1] Since texture splatting is commonly used for terrain rendering in computer games, various optimizations are required.

Because the underlying principle is for each texture to have its own alpha channel, large amounts of memory can easily be consumed.

Alpha-based texture splatting, though simple, gives rather unnatural transitions.