Texturing individual faces of an object

Hello, a few weeks into my blender experience and needing some help:

Right now I am embarked on a project to model real terrain. I have imported SRTM elevation data to create a ground object separated into land and water. Because this is a rather large project that will include many models I have opted not to use particle based grass and am simply using a boring grass material with procedural noise to add a smidgen of realism.

The problem I am experiencing is I want to apply the material to each individual face of the land object, so that the noise that adds realism is not stretched over the entire landscape. I know how to do this by individually clicking each face in edit mode and applying the material there, but I have an exceedingly large number of faces that makes the manual application unrealistic. Is there a way to automate the “tiling” of a material. I know there are ways with UV Maps, but I was hoping to just stick with the procedural texture.

Any help would be appreciated, and telling me my approach is stupid and suggesting a proper one is equally welcome, so long as it can be scaled to a very large scene.

Thanks

Instead of applying an extra Material for each face (This won’t go very far, because there is a limit of 16 Materials for each object, afaik), you should tell Blender to repeat the texture as often as you like.
This is done with sizeX, sizeY, sizeZ in the MapInput panel of the Materialbuttons.

You might want to read this manual

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Textures/Options/Map_Input

Patel

Try this :
- select object
- go to Edit panels ( F9 ) > Mesh tab > UV Texture field > New button to add new UV layer. Note : if object already has UV layers , change name of new one ( e.g. ‘repeat’ )
- go to Material panels ( F5 ) > Texture tab > select your texture then > Map Input tab > select UV button . Note : if object has more than 1 UV layer then Map Input tab > UV input field and write name ( e.g. ‘repeat’ )
- render

Important : do NOT unwrap this uv layer in edit mode, just add new under Mesh tab.
If object has unwrapped and no needed UV layer you can delete it then add new one or go to Edit mode select all faces with A-key then U-key > Reset.
If faces have different , irregular shape texture will be stretched to bound of every face.

Another thing : if you use texture image , you can repeat it under Texture buttons ( F6 ) > Map Image tab or use Patel’s method but it will not work with procedural texture.

Thank you guys both, that really helps. I ended up trying jawra’s first method first and it worked.

Thanks again