How to pack more details into my terrain?

Jazon99

Hi! 

How do you pack more details into larger terrain meshes? 
Lets say I want to build moon like terrain. 500m x 500m area. If I texture it in Substance Painter with 8k PBR materials I get about 16 pixel per meter resolution for color, normal maps. If I look it at close range it looks pixelated, not so bad, but,... I cant place vegetation on it, it is moon like terrain. How would that usually be done to pack more detail? Thank you!

dimwalker

Rocks. Lots and lots of rocks.

okidoki

In games this is usually done with tiled textures.. but then also breaking the tiling with every possiible asset like tree, bushes, herbs, grass ,  barrels and boxes(!) and of course.. rocks ..also blending them with vertex colors as controlling mix factor..

..or have a look here:  Blender Guru: How to Tile a Texture Without Repetition - Blender Tutorial.. i'm sure you do this in other applications too

Alex_J

for the tiling textures you likely want to combine it with using a splat map: 
Splat - polycount

basically it is a master texture that controls where tiling textures go. If you overlay some textures on top of all of that it can look pretty convincing without a lot of work. 

Jazon99

If I use 3ds max,.. So max doesn't use splat maps, no way for that I need to use composite texture and plug mask for each separate layer? Is it a better way than composite tex to do it in .max?

Eric Chadwick

I would suggest generating erosion on the terrain using a dedicated tool like WorldMachine or Terragen or the like. This will make a splat map for you, which you can use in a Composite node as your layer masks.

To isolate the RGB color channels you can use Color Correction nodes, or even easier just use a single OSL Uber Map node.