What's the best way to go about making a very large (20kx20k) ground texture without using tiling?

SaxPanther

So I'm working on a MOBA game. We're going for the classic hand-painted art style, which means little to no tiling textures. I've been working on the ground texture on and off for the past few weeks but it is an incredibly daunting task, I've never seen any tutorials about how to do something like this and it's hard to find examples of this on typical sites like Artstation etc.

I was wondering if anyone could provide me with some advice on how to work on this, best practices, etc.? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'll show a bit of what I've been working on so far.

Here's a little bit: https://i.gyazo.com/132fd850c3a418fd95f3a308854ec970.png

However this took a couple hours, and the whole map is this large: https://i.gyazo.com/e46ab67baac35ede170fff251e6d465c.jpg

Thanks!

lotet

That is NOT how you do it AT ALL.!
(unless for some specific reason you have to do it this way then please ignore this post and sorry if this came of to basic and obvious).

First of you have tiling textures for grass and stuff, that you paint in with a mask. so  for example have a dirt texture and a grass texture that you use a mask texture to blend/change between to create roads and/or other variations,

specific and unique places/objects should have their own meshes and textures. so if you have a big stone circle or something you can make that its own mesh with its uniqie texture sheet. hope that helps.


If you really need to make it one whole giant thing, Id suggest using Udims to split it up.

SaxPanther

lotet said:

That is NOT how you do it AT ALL.!
(unless for some specific reason you have to do it this way then please ignore this post and sorry if this came of to basic and obvious).

First of you have tiling textures for grass and stuff, that you paint in with a mask. so  for example have a dirt texture and a grass texture that you use a mask texture to blend/change between to create roads and/or other variations,

specific and unique places/objects should have their own meshes and textures. so if you have a big stone circle or something you can make that its own mesh with its uniqie texture sheet. hope that helps.


If you really need to make it one whole giant thing, Id suggest using Udims to split it up.

Yeah, I tried tiling at first but it just didn't hit the quality bar I was looking for. Grass needs to grow around points of interest, for example, and the blades of grass should be pointing in a meaningful direction. The ground texture needs to guide the players. If there was some kind of more artistic and intentional method of tiling that would be cool. I'm mostly using the clone stamp brush for now. What are Udims?

Zack Maxwell

SaxPanther said:

lotet said:

That is NOT how you do it AT ALL.!
(unless for some specific reason you have to do it this way then please ignore this post and sorry if this came of to basic and obvious).

First of you have tiling textures for grass and stuff, that you paint in with a mask. so  for example have a dirt texture and a grass texture that you use a mask texture to blend/change between to create roads and/or other variations,

specific and unique places/objects should have their own meshes and textures. so if you have a big stone circle or something you can make that its own mesh with its uniqie texture sheet. hope that helps.


If you really need to make it one whole giant thing, Id suggest using Udims to split it up.

Yeah, I tried tiling at first but it just didn't hit the quality bar I was looking for. Grass needs to grow around points of interest, for example, and the blades of grass should be pointing in a meaningful direction. The ground texture needs to guide the players. If there was some kind of more artistic and intentional method of tiling that would be cool. I'm mostly using the clone stamp brush for now. What are Udims?

People would also like to use a million polygons on their characters if they could, but you need to make concessions in order for it to actually be usable. If you can't even work on it without your computer chugging, how do you expect it to be rendered in game?

lotet

It seams like you need to read up on how to make environment art in general. using a giant flat texture is just not a practical solution.
Here is a good way to start.

what you should do is use decals or similar systems to create unique textures for those grass edges your talking about for example.

the art of diablo III GDC talk is also really good, they did some really cool stuff thats similar to how League of legends handle their environment art. worth checking out.