Texturing and rendering a high-poly terrain

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi,

I’ve set up a plane with a height map, lit it with an HDR map and baked the lighting into the texture in Cycles, creating a snowy mountainscape.

This works fine for the first few subdivision levels, but to obtain the necessary detail (the camera comes quite close) I’d have to subdivide the mesh many times more, causing blender to crash when baking/rendering. What is the correct way to create a large, highly detailed terrain-mesh like this?

Also: Is there a better way of texturing this large mesh than having a single, huge texture file?

terrain.jpg1500×1265 692 KB

2

you dont need that much detail, and if u go close, then u dont need that big of a scene.

how close are u planning on going? adapt, as u go closer, increase the details and crop off only what you need.

3

how big is the mesh ?

i use a 1440x1440 mesh for most of my minor body Ceres renderings

http://7.t.imgbox.com/QNCjZQtR.jpg

a google photo album
https://goo.gl/photos/iAtFUPmE4QVxpcY29
some of these are a bit old

i make a mesh from a DEM using the displacement mod

why dont you make a normal map ( tangent) and use that with a low res mesh
i turn a 500 meg mesh into a 12 meg model for Celestia ( 24 meg zip with normal and texture)

Also: Is there a better way of texturing this large mesh than having a single, huge texture file?

define single huge texture .
i consider big as 32768x32768 and huge as 65536x65536 and UP

the image above is a 1024x1024 texture on the mesh

4

Thanks for the suggestions!