Using Megatextures

When using extremely large and detailed textures in Sapphire, there are a few tips and rules to be considered. These are explained below.

In Sapphire, the terrain is broken into 'patches' that typically cover 64×64 heightfield pixels. If the texture is a mosaic, each texture tile must cover at least one terrain patch, or else there will be visible streaking of the texture. For small textures (8x texture resolution or less), you do not have to do anything for the texture to render properly in Sapphire, so long as you keep the texture tile size at 512px or an integral multiple thereof. However, for extremely high-resolution textures (16x, 32x), you will have to adjust the texture tile size and/or the patch size for it to render properly. Suggested values for texture tile size and patch size are given below.

For 32x texture res, you may use the following combinations of terrain patch size and texture tile size:

Of these, the 32/1024 combination is recommended.

For 16x texture res, you may use the following combinations of terrain patch size and texture tile size:

Of these, the 64/1024 combination is recommended.

For texture resolutions of 8x or less, use 512x tiles and leave the patch size at 64.