Question about tiling textures with game maps

Support Materials and Textures
#1

Hi,

Not sure whether to ask this here or game section but here it goes…

Not really a ‘how to’ question but I’m hoping someone could help me understand something. When making a map with say, a big outdoor area I know that you have to use tiling textures, even layers of tiling textures. What I can’t seem to get my head around is the resolution of the map itself. Say in a game like world of Warcraft or tomb raider or whatever, the land or zone you walk through is massive. Surely it’s not a plane that’s been unwrapped and given a texture with a massive scale? I know the textures are tiled, but they still have to go onto an unwrapped plane right? So how would the plane be so big without losing res?

Not sure if I explained the question very clearly but I hope someone can explain.

Cheers big ears.

#2

either using a tile texture as you said, a massive texture witch i think is the case in world of warcraft, but bigger games uses multible tile textures.
such as a sand texture, cobblestone, grass, etc, and they use a black and white image on top of it (low res but BIG scale) to determin what texture will show through.

for instance if you have grass, with a road, its a tiled grass texture, and a cobblestone or gravel texture, with a BW image on top used as a factor.

there is also another way witch uses vektors, but thats a bit more complex and i dont know much about it myself. it allows you to have multible textures on a big plane with a sharp transaction from one texture to another, without having to have an insane high ress BW image as factor, but rather vector curves.

#3

like this, and it can also be done with tilable textures.

#4

Fimalbarrage cheers for the reply. The merging and layering of the tile sets i can understand. Its the sheer texture size of the map that confuses me.

Say an outdoor area that could take you five minutes to cross must have a massive texture size. I just thought that was frowned upon in the gaming world

#5

You can find plenty of info on the technique googling texture/material splatting.

The splat map (which determines which texture shows where) does NOT have to be an image texture, you can use vertex colors.

#6

And you can find info on the other technique by googling texturing terrain based on slope.

#7

Helluvamesh thats just what i was looking for thanks! Do you know if this is possible to do in blender then export to unity? Most of the tutorials i see are just done in unity

#8

What does “this” refer to? Which technique?

#9

Texture splating. To make a map and export to unity

#10

I don’t know about Unity but generally speaking, you should make materials in game engines and not try to import them from other software. This is especially true with more advanced materials. But you can always ask about it on Unity forums.

#11

But modeling the actual map would be fine im presuming. No textures

#12

Of course. But in case of terrain, a good terrain generator can save you lots and lots of time, such as WorldMachine or L3DT.