How to pack more details into my terrain?

Jazon99 · May 2 2024

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 · May 3 2024

Rocks. Lots and lots of rocks.

okidoki · May 3 2024

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 · May 3 2024

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 · May 4 2024

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 · May 4 2024

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.

How to pack more details into my terrain?

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