I am wondering how to make good looking terrain. I would like to know how the terrain is textured so that the tiles blend together. Such as instead of a grass texture ending and rock starting it looks as though the grass texture fades out as the rock texture fades in. Also in my attempts at making terrain the textures don''t look good because you can see the tiles and where the stop and start, and a pattern can be recognized. Is there anyway to blend the textures so that that it looks real? I am new at this so all help is appreciated.

Take a look at this thread:

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=189751

There''s a great thread about terrain texturing,
using vertex stored alpha and different tiling scales:
Creating detailed terrain under severe limitations
(this is one of Yann''s greatest threads, so definitely worth a read )

IMO, blending look too non-natural.

I''m using different way, interpolating "texture selector".it''s works in very simple way:

some value specified for each vertex interpolated between vertexes (like weight in blending).
Textures then combined together in that way:
if interpolated_value+ fractal_noise> 0 then use pixel from texture1 else
pixel from texture2.
So border between textures are nice sharp fractal,like in nature.
It also closes bilinear interpolation.

Fractal noise are pre-calculated into special texture that should be ideally tiled at different interval.
I.e. if both textures are 1024x1024, noise coordinates for vertexes = texture coordinates * 1.2342345634467;
that scaring number is just random and used to prevent visible tiling at same interval.So on mesh,texture
and noise will be tiled at different intervals.
You can do all this in shader script.


I''m using that idea in Voxel World project :

http://dmytrylavrov.narod.ru/voxfoge.htm

there''s 8 textures, that''s 3 textures for ice/snow and 5 for stones.

And also there''s nice rolling fog with shadows in it ... (shadows casted by hills)

Regards,

Dmytry Lavrov.