Texturing a very large ground

[Stefdln]

Hi everyone

To introduce myself, I am quite a seasoned 3d generalist but as I’m self taught and dont work in “the industry” I have my own flaws and there are things I can’t always figure out by myself.

One of these is being able to texture very large surfaces (mostly for archviz and design related projects).

I’m currently working on a project that requires me to texture a very large gravel floor just like in the picture after.

I really have no idea on how to make it properly. It has to look good for closeups and from afar. I must use displacement as the goal is to be the most realistic possible. I took a few shots at it but as soon as I bake my textures into 4k to keep things as light as possible it looks horrible from from a close standpoint.

I’ve heard about texture bombing but I fear this will break up my normals and displacement in blending areas and then introduce a kind of pattern. Maybe I should cut the mesh in let’s say 2 meters patches but seams might cause problems.

Are there people familiar with large environments here who might help me how to sort this out ? I would be very grateful.

Thanks in advance
Cheers

[jakemoyo]

We need to first nail down what do you mean by “looks horrible from a close standpoint” and “looks properly”? Cause they’re going to have different causes, different solutions etc.

Texture bombing is what you do when you have a seamless texture that still has a strong “tiling” effect when viewed at a distance.

That’s one issue solved. If that’s part of why you think it looks bad.

If, on the other hand, your issue is that it looks extremely pixelated when viewed from up close then you can do a couple of things in your shader to make it look better. A good first step would be to use the Camera Data distance output as the factor between two mixed shaders, both variations of your ground material. You can just use the same exact textures but I think it looks better if you use a variant of the same intended material. I dyed the base colors brightly to illustrate the effect.

The textures in your “close” version can be higher resolution and scaled “up” (actually making it smaller/repeat more) to make it look better up close.

The tiling is extremely visible from afar, but that doesn’t matter because the shader switches to the distant texture before we’ll ever see it like this.

You can also add a third texture set, set to an unrelated scale and then overlay that over both materials to break up their tiling and kinda “gel” the whole thing together. With this you can also use only the roughness and normal to add variation, or skip the 3rd material and just use a noise texture, or both.

Third Variation Concrete, on its’ own.

The effect is subtle, but it definitely adds another level of realism.

You can also use a dirt material, rain puddles, wetness map as the “variation” material as well.

There are tons of different options honestly, all dependent on your use case, performance needs, etc.

[Modron]

An alternative would be to scatter mesh gravel using camera culling to cut down on memory usage.

[Stefdln]

Thanks to both of you for your feedback, I will give these options a try.
Yeah sorry by horrible I meant it looked pixelated and you could see the texel density was not “at its best” to say the least.
I just always wonder how environment artists manage to make such good looking huge assets in video games nowadays, as all the videos I saw on this particular topic never really could answer to this question.

[jakemoyo]

Check out ArtStation learn, they have a lot of good in-depth tutorials on all kinds of topics and they’re all actually done by industry professionals, so you know the info is reliable and up-to-date. They’re not gonna be the most beginner friendly tutorials, like they’re not gonna show you exactly which buttons to click, might be working in Maya or Max, but their workflows will almost always transfer just fine.

The two methods I showed are some of the most basic and universal techniques for using tiling textures for large assets, so I would start there for sure. But there are probably dozens of different approaches that fit any number of projects.

[Stefdln]

Thanks mate it wont be an issue at all for me, I will give it a try, thanks