It's exactly like Higuy said - we used both techniques. It depends on the individual situation. Because of performance, we couldn't cover everything with decals, so we only used them as a support and painted the major spots with terrain material.
hey nice breakdown! One smaller question: Do you create special alpha maps for every decal-version of such textures or do you have a library of generics for them? I've done this mixed approach too but I found it tends to get a bit messy without organizing files from the beginning great work!
These sand textures are my favorite visual in the whole game, excellent work. Thank you for sharing the breakdown. I am surprised and delighted you achieved this type of quality without having to brush these textures in Zbrush. A couple questions: 1. Was the blend material using vert colour painting to blend the different…