OK, at the moment I use a tiling method to get smooth transitions from one terrain texture to another on my terrain. This is not a substantially different method from that used by Warcraft III. But... the tiling is a real pain to set up, and making it look natural requires a LOT of tile pieces. Another method I know of is to use a single great big texture file for the entire map. With this, you can do some really smooth and natural blending, but it comes at the expense of having really big map file sizes. As I understand it, this method is essentially the same as using a lightmap, except that it''s a full-detail texture. But now I''ve just seen the technology demo of the Crytech engine (crytech.com), and in that they show terrain texture painting that is completely smooth and interractive, and - given their map-sizes - unlikely to be method2 above. Enlighten me as to what I''m missing. Learning to fly is easy, but as a tortoise, the landings are really rough.

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Learning to fly is easy, but as a tortoise, the landings are really rough.

You really dont need that many textures to make your tiled terrain look good. You just need to learn how to transition between them.

Learn about Alphablending, and how to transition between textures.

I got the alpha-blending down fine. And I''m using alpha-mapped textures for the edgings between textures. At the moment, I have to use a minimum of 3 edging tiles provided that I rotate and flip them properly (corner, straight and L-shape). This provides me with the minimum number of edge pieces to describe any concave area. However, it still leaves me with a tile-based solution that looks fairly rectangular. I can get about 4 variations of each edge piece to help it look less rigid, but... well, take a look at the crytech technology demo - that texture painting is really neat, and doesn''t look tile-based at all.

Learning to fly is easy, but as a tortoise, the landings are really rough.

Sorry, I meant www.crytek.com

That texture painting is just soooo smooth.

Edited for hyperlink.
Learning to fly is easy, but as a tortoise, the landings are really rough.

[edited by - SoaringTortoise on March 17, 2003 2:44:48 AM]