Hi Metalliandy,
metalliandy wrote:Hey Aaron,
If i was to use a texture like this...
...What sort of results could i expect?
I can't rightly say. I suspect you'd need to make an awfully high-res terrain texture for it to look right, and then you may have repeating artefacts. The lighting in the grass image may also cause a problem if you want to use other lighting directions in your terrain texture. I'm not sure it would look good from a distance either.
Normally fine textural data like this is just added by modulating a detail map (which could be that very grass image, in black and white) over the top of the lower-res terrain texture at rendertime. Just why this is so should become obvious later in my post.
metalliandy wrote:Would higher res source textures help?
Up to a point. Of course, there is no point in having a source texture that is larger than your output terrain texture.
metalliandy wrote:Is there a size limit for texture sizes?
I think at the moment the source textures must be non-mosaic, so as a rule of thumb I'd recommend keeping their size lower than 8192x8192 pixels.
metalliandy wrote:If i use a 1024x1024 texture would the texture be scaled correctly or would i get huge blades of grass?
L3DT doesn't automagically 'know' the scale of a texture image, so you'd have to do the math to get this right. At a guess, I'd say that particular 1024x1024 pixel grass texture covered an area of about 1mx1m. So, for every square metre of terrain in your map, you'd have to make sure the heightfield and texture resolutions were enough to give 1024x1024 texture pixels per square metre.
By the way, that means if you want a map to cover, say, one square kilometre (a reasonable outdoor FPS map), you would need your output texture to be about
one million by one million pixels (a terapixel). That's why the really high-res stuff like grass blade textures are normally done by detail maps or splatting. Even ET:QW doesn't use terapixel textures (they use single-digit gigapixel maps).
In any case, you can make terapixel textures with L3DT Pro if you so desire, but it might take a lifetime to generate. The settings you'd want for 'true' scaling with that texture are a heightfield resolution of 0.031m (!) and a texture resolution of 32x. The math is:
- Code: Select all
Pixels_per_metre = TX_res / HF_res
= 32 / 0.031m
= 1024 pixels per metre
metalliandy wrote:Could i replace the default textures with 1024 x1024 versions or do i need to keep the 256 sizes currently used?
Yes (you can replace textures) and no (you don't have to keep the same size).
Cheerio,
Aaron.