For my engine, I'm working on the terrain painting functionality in the world editor program. I'm using texture splatting to render my terrain chunks, this gives me a 4 texture limit on individual chunks... and until I find a better technique for texturing, this is how it's going to stay.

In my editor I have a large range of textures to choose from, and currently when you paint onto the terrain, the engine searches through the Chunk's 4 textures, if it finds the one that we're currently painting.. then it just adds to that channel.

But, the problem comes if we have 4 textures painted onto a chunk.. and we try painting another... currently my engine finds the texture with the least coverage and swaps that over to the one we're painting... which works, but sometimes it means swapping a texture that I'd rather not lose (it may have less coverage.. but it's more important.. like a thin path to walk on or something).

I'm just wondering how other engines /programmers address this problem of painting with limited textures, without hassling the level artist too much?

Jon

Split your textures.

You can either do it one of two ways.

1) Texture merging

Instead of having four textures (say grass, sand, rock, earth) you combine them into a single texture. Grass top left. Sand top right. etc.

Then in the pixel shader you modify the UV coordinates to grab the texture you want (or the mix of textures you want)

2) Multipass rendering

Draw your terrain with four textures, then do another draw pass with another four textures.

I prefer the first technique, but the second is used very successfully in many engines.

Thanks guys, this helps alot! It's a shame we can't have 'virtual texture units' it would solve so many issues with texturing.

Jon :)

Another approach which I worked on at a past company was to allow the artists to work on as many layers as they want, by flattening the result into rendertargets at runtime, with the flattened rendertargets placed akin to clipmaps. The editor gave the artists an indicator as to the complexity of the area and what general performance would be like.