Texturing a large terrain?

Hello everyone!

I just wanted to find out how people go about texturing large terrains. Which method would make the game run faster:
-using one large texture
-using several moderate textures

Help would be appreciated.:slight_smile:

How much kb or mb do you think the textures are on this image? Guess before you continue reading and let me know what you would have guessed.


I wouldn’t recommend you one huge image for your terain textures. I’m not really an expert but I think using low file size images combinated with stencil maps etc. would be a better solution, I don’t know much about stencil maps, it must be possible to use more than 1 images that way I gues, or layers above… Well anyway, been experimenting with low file size textures and trying to keep decent details, the textures in th image have a texture + normalmap of it, all 128 x 128 resolution, 72dpi, jpg file and both texture and normal map are between 7kb and 14kb! Well I think that’s very light for the detail you remain. ^^

Hope it helps your thinking process in some way.

just to make the searching easier: what wouter meant instead of “stensel” was “stencil” :wink:
and, yes, as far as i know, that is your method of choice to texture terrains…

Told you I didn’t know much about them.:stuck_out_tongue:

Alright, thanks guys! I’ll check out some tutorials for stencil maps :smiley:

Hey Dhaher,
would be good to know what do you mean with “large terrains”. I did an experimental project where I tried to get landscape of Arma2 island called UTES. It was about 2.7x2.7 km landspace full of objects, with aerial image as a texture seen from higher distance and as I moved closer to the ground detail surfaces started to mix over aerial texture check this video http://vimeo.com/14571756, it is from Czech/Slovak blender conference(so I was speaking slovak), take it just like a showcase(I would like to create a new thread and post more details there).

For this project I decided to cut whole terrain to the bunch of tiles(see pic.[ATTACH=CONFIG]127117[/ATTACH]) and cut aerial texture as well so each terrain tile has its own texture(it was 128x128, but Im not sure now). I had to write some scripts to automatically cut terrain and create UVs for each tile.

hi Dhaher,
i just found a great stencil painting and other related tecniques tutorial,
here it is the link for ya:

its a 4 days tutorial so u may want to go to the first day page !
i hope this helps,
Romy