Texturing Question

[Alexander]

I am trying to figure out whether L3DT is able to produce an effect/technique that I am looking to achieve for a real-time project. I'll do my best to explain what I need:

My terrain texture is going to drape over a terrain around 20km x 20km (roughly 8k x 8k resolution) and it must look correct close up as well as far away. What I would like to do, is generate a general attributes map for the larger scale features and use similarly larger scale splatting images for the texture at this "level":




This texture would be directly correlated with the small scale detailing complete with close up splatting images:





The final output would be a very high resolution texture map which features the "close" splats for detail that builds up the "far" detail.

Looking forward to hearing back!

[Aaron]

Hi Alexander,

I'm sorry for the slow reply; I've been ruminating on the best way to do this.

Just to get this straight: What you want is one big texture that looks highly detailed close-up and further away looks like your low-res textures? If so, the problem is that L3DT does not 'know' your camera position, so you can only have a fixed ratio of low-res to high-res blending in the final texture. If you're careful with your texture layer settings you'll probably be able to produce the desired result, but it won't be easy.

What might work better for you is to generate two terrain textures (one using the low-res texture set, and one using the high-res set), and then blend between the two at rendertime using either multitexturing or a splatting shader.

Cheers,
Aaron.