Hi, I'm using SlimDX and Direct3D11. I'm coming up to a bit of a problem when it comes to rendering textures.

My game is a procedural galaxy, where the content is created before the game begins (as opposed to dynamically). This includes planetary surface textures (although they'll be really instantiated as a set of parameters to only be created and stored when the player is close to them - to save on hard-disk space and memory). The problem with the surface textures is that they have to be very large indeed (I aim to have stylistic cube planets, which means I need a 3x2 net of 2048x2048 textures with matching normals and specular maps (to deal with when the player is close to the planet). I've read a few articles on how to generate these textures, and I think I now have Perlin noise in my grasp, but I'm struggling to work out how I'm actually going to render these textures once I've created them.

I have a deferred rendering pipeline set up where I pass in my geometry, my textures, normals, specular maps and lights and calculate the various light maps, colour maps and position maps, which I combine later. I used to combine textures into a couple of texture maps, send them to the GPU and work from there, however with the sheer size of some of the textures involved that's not an option any more.

Has anybody had this problem before? If so, how did they get around it?

Thanks,

Nick.

Ah I'm a bit of an idiot. I reckon I have it figured out now.

If I generate 10 or so base textures and blend between them using a blend map (and maybe a colour adjustment map for variation) I should be able to achieve sufficiently diverse worlds without breaking the bank on textures and normals.