Texturing large scale objects, without losing texture density?

AwakenerOfDusk

Hello, everyone!

I was wondering on how you'd create large environmental pieces without losing out on texture density?

For example, would you create the albedo in a bigger resolution and keep the normals as it is? sound silly, I know. To be clearer, when I say "large environmental pieces" I meant those non-modular pieces like cliff and large rock features? 

If not an albedo with a higher resolution, would it be a detail map overlay through shader? I'm quite puzzled on how one would approach the texture density problem, since it would be easier to make a tiling texture for a modular object like say a building, since it's not organic and most of the texture density wouldn't be affected much.

Since I saw a picture post on Uncharted 4, specifically  Jared Sobotta - on how he made those large rock structure but doesn't seem too lose much detail. Would that still be a tiling texture but without normal map and just raw silhouette mesh with a tiling texture and vertex painting applied? Other references would be the ones I saw from  Jacob Norris .

I've just recently figured out, how normal maps work and how to bake clean normals - but seeing that one problem has been dealt with another arises (TnT), mostly on the albedo and possibly roughness - which would probably be solve with either one of them being given an answer to.

If anyone has a suggestion on the large scale object and texture density, please do share - I'd love to hear your thoughts about it, since there aren't many topics that I found while searching on large meshes and textures.

Thank you~

Obscura

Those large rocks seems to use only a few tiling materials, that are blended using vertex colors or masks. You can have 2-3 tiling rock textures and moss separately and vertex paint the different rocks and moss on your mesh. Large scale objects are usually approached with tiling texture, because of the resolution reason. You would be surprised how often tiling and trim textures are used in games, instead of unique ones. 

AwakenerOfDusk

Obscura said:

Those large rocks seems to use only a few tiling materials, that are blended using vertex colors or masks. You can have 2-3 tiling rock textures and moss separately and vertex paint the different rocks and moss on your mesh. Large scale objects are usually approached with tiling texture, because of the resolution reason. You would be surprised how often tiling and trim textures are used in games, instead of unique ones. 

Thank Obscure! I've tried and experimented with the tiling textures as you said and made a shader that blends two materials using Height map data or/and Splat map. I also figured out that most of the larger rock type objects are separate rock models placed to make a silhouette of a form.

Looks like what I said previously, with the normal HP + LP bakes were completely wrong (_>p^)b, since it wouldn't work out or scale pretty well.

Again, Thanks Obscura!

EDIT: I would of liked to get around understanding the technicality of vertex painting but, I have no Idea how to implement that. Its more of a lack in knowledge than anything. (VmV).

Mant1k0re

There are many videos explaining how to do this in UE4 on Youtube. Just type type vertex painting ue4 there the first few hit will teach you how to do it.

AwakenerOfDusk

Mant1k0re said:

There are many videos explaining how to do this in UE4 on Youtube. Just type type vertex painting ue4 there the first few hit will teach you how to do it.

I don't use UE4, since I usually make most of the systems I use; so I kinda need to understand the technical aspect of it (_TuT;). But I do have an inkling of the basics after looking through blender concepts.