Hello,
Kind of a Blender Newbie, got interested in making my own game as a hobby.
So I was interested in designing in detail a VERY LARGE MAP. To give you an idea, to match the scale in my mind, I made a box that is 2 kilometers wide. I intend on making the walls appear like canyon walls, a big grass field in the middle, spotted with a large number of a trees, and including some grass “billboards” if that’s the word they use anymore. The character I will be using will be tiny in comparison.
So, I’ve already ran my face into the wall playing with textures on smaller scale stuff for fun. I made a half decent animated pokeball that I’m proud of, but now were biting off a large more.
My issue comes down to I really don’t know what’s best conceptually or procedurally to get a half decent end product. My questions are specific to Texturing, but don’t be afraid to be critical about how I designed/modeled it.
So I’m painting Grass on the “floor”. I like how when I use a flat out material using a seamless grass texture, scaled down by 10x, presents a half decent field when you step down to the character level, which mind you, is like 8 meters tall. A dot on the map. But its very bland, am I having trouble making it look spotty with a dirt like texture, because I tend to UV unwrap on it, and then try texture painting. I guess by the end I want to bake it an make it a texture and not a material in the end product. Am I in the right direction? What Am I missing? Should I be using a much bigger file size to paint on instead of 2048 x 2048 to get better resolution? Or should I rip up this big box into 100 smaller pieces and detail the crap out of each one and squeeze them together? Would that really slow down my game when I add phyisics and what not? Should I be doing something goofy with Materials instead of baking a UV? Meanwhile, I’d like to use the same technique on the walls with rock and cliff textures.
So, I kinda did some research, and I seen a lot of cool stuff about LOD shaders, but I’ve got no clue how to really go about making the texture to do this. I had downloaded someone elses example to get a feel for how they pulled it off, and I was perplexed. I do think I want to implement LOD because I don’t want having a kilometer long view of a lot of trees and stuff grinding it down when I want the character to be focused on whats near them. Any thoughts, suggestions, advice?
Any critical thoughts on the matter would be appreciated. I really like more a discussion of the topic than a link to some step by step tutorial, because I’m trying to understand it, not emulate it.