Detail mapping
Author
I''m using a detail map to achieve the amount of detail I need for my terrain. It works fine on short distance, but a long distance I get all too much noise, which makes it look really bad. Any suggestions on how to avoid this?
Hi,
I don''t know which texture operation you are using for the detail map, but assuming it is "add signed":
1. Make sure the average pixel value of the detail map is 128, or it will lighten/darken the terrain.
2. To avoid noise on a long distance, you could try to use mipmapping for the detail map and set the second and above levels to (128,128,128). That way, you''ll get noise for parts of the terrain that are close to the camera, and normal terrain as the distance increase.
I don''t know which texture operation you are using for the detail map, but assuming it is "add signed":
1. Make sure the average pixel value of the detail map is 128, or it will lighten/darken the terrain.
2. To avoid noise on a long distance, you could try to use mipmapping for the detail map and set the second and above levels to (128,128,128). That way, you''ll get noise for parts of the terrain that are close to the camera, and normal terrain as the distance increase.
It sounds like you may have neglected to enable mipmapping in the detail texture stage - you need to for every texture stage individually. I''ve not looked recently, can someone remember the texture state name? You want to set it to the ___LINEAR option.
Author
I just didn''t know that I had to set the mip mapping filter to linear too, when I''ve already set the min and max filter to linear. But it looks great now 
Anisotropic filtering, atleast in my experiences, screws around with the visual quality of that form of detail texturing. Use a medium blue base texture, then a detail texture with lots of noise, and you''ll probably see what I mean. Linear smoothly interpolates as it gets further, but aniso kind of creates an effect I can only describe as looking like flame licks.
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