How do they pull this off? http://www.blizzard.com/wow/ScreenShot.aspx?ImageIndex=42&Set=0 Right now I am using just a color map and several layers of detail textures. This is obviously not what they do, because each different kind of terrain has a distinct pattern. Do they use texture splatting? I found it to be far too slow on lower end cards. There is no sign of textures repeating in the screenshots either: http://www.blizzard.com/wow/ScreenShot.aspx?ImageIndex=118&Set=0 Could it be a detail texture plus texture splatting? That would slow things down even more, and even a video card with 8 texture units would need several passes to render the terrain. I know it''s a little...ambitious (stupid?)...to model something after a multi-million dollar project, but I would really like to know so I might be able to base something simpler off of it. My method stops looking realistic as soon as you realize that everything has the same pattern in it. Back to texture splatting... The only way this could possibly pull off a decent framerate is if the video card realizes you are rendering the same vertices again and doesn''t spend any time calculating. Is this what it does?

I would multitexturing, texture blending and detail map.
Nothing mind checking, would require 3/4 textures, done in 2 pass on a TNT card, 1 pass on current top hardware.


-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-

Sometimes you people amaze me...

How do they do the blending? "texture blending" says nothing about how it is done.