Suggestions for dealing with too many alpha layers

[Hypnotron]

Hello,
I'm curious about techniques I can use with alpha splatting and l3dt alphamaps. L3dt often results in so many layers (this last map I generated has 10!) and for a PS 2.0 card I think one base texture and 3 alpha layers can be done in one pass. More than that and things get too slow.

So i've toyed with merging various layers that are similar and have lower coverage, but the bottom line is, the results of a single high resolution texture map looks better to me, then the splatting method. Of course the very high resolution version consumes too much texture memory and its starts to look pixelated up close. Splatting uses less memory, and you can avoid the close up pixelation but the overal terrain just doesnt look as good to me.

So can anyone recommend some techniques for getting closer to the best of both worlds?
Thanks.
-Mike

[demi]

http://www.gamedev.net/columns/hardcore ... /page3.asp

Good info there. Using the method described to do multipass you could probably get by with 4 passes. Highly unlikely that you would have all textures in view at once so most calls will be ignored. Speed issues may arise though since it does put a load on the GPU.

Hope that helps

Demi

[Hypnotron]

Thanks.

You're right about not having all those textures in view at once or at least, that some areas have more concentrations of certain types than other. So i'll just have to tweak 'em by hand I think.

Being a programmer first and an artist... like... 1,259th, i was hoping to avoid such a thing but I guess until I can convince Aaron to build l3dt into my own personal tool specific to my needs, i'll just have to bite the bullet