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I'm beginning to dive into the world of outdoor modeling, and I'm looking into techniques for making landscapes, specifically, texturing them. My current method is to create a few blend maps to get a nice variation going on (sand to grass to rock etc), then bake the texture to the landscape object. I have to bake the texture directly to the object because DBP does not support blend mapping of materials. The problem this creates is the bigger the landscape, the more pixelated the texture becomes. I currently have a not too large landscape baked at 2028x2028 and it looks pretty heinus close up:

Texture baked into landscape (see how pixely it is close up? The player is even closer than that)


Original, pretty blend mapping:


I was considering using the old-fashioned DB matrix method where you make textures for every possible blend type and manually texture your object by hand, but this seems silly to me. That and I'm not really sure how I would go about doing it.

So, for people who hopefully have done this kind of stuff before, what's a good way to create a non pixelated landscape? A baked texture on a large landscape ruins the quality, and I'm not sure how to about individually texturing each section. Any ideas are apprecieated.

Actually...I dunno I just imported it into Dark Basic, which does that mip mappy thing or whatever that blurs the texture...it looks like this:



Does that look bad? The ground looks really poor to me, but I haven't seen many DB landscapes before. I was just playint Battlefield 2 and like all commercial games, it hit me that the entire, huge map, is detailed up and down. The dirt below your feet looks like a non-stretched, quality texture. How can I achieve such monumental detail?

Well, tile the texture a bit more

Not really sure what can you do, anyways did you imported your ground model in DBC or DBP?

dbp does support texture blending, however only through dbo objects, and there is no .dbo exporter for max yet.

Have you considered LoD by any chance? You could divide your landscape into sections and not only consider polygons, but also apply a much larger texture for the section that the player is on....that's how I do landscapes.

Sadly it wouldn't work, the issue is whatever image is on it originally, no matter how tiled, will get stretched out. Plus if I tile it too much it will become ugly.


LoD = level of detail? The only gripe I have with this solution is that I would need to render so many huge textures for each landscape the user is on that it would rack up file sizes. I could just as easily make one giganticer texture to put over the whole landscape.

edit:

DBP