hi here s the class that holds terrain batches in my engine -the psztexture pointers hold the name of the texture that is use for the correspondent layer -blendfactor holds RGB values for blending layer 1 2 3 onto the baselayer 0 -m_pShader* are pointers to structures that hold the properties defined in .shader files now to the CShader thing it contains material properties used for opengl lighting like mat_ambient ... you specify dot3 bumpmaps parallax mapping there you can give each texture a detailmap and specify the blendmode so if i use dot3 bumpmapping parallax mapping and a detailmap for each layer i get up to 16 texture units, the maximum on a geforce 6800 now my batches are devided into 512*512 units e.g. the player is 72 units large and i want to feature up to 8 lights now i don t know how i should render all this the most efficient way i will need multiple passes thats clear + the shadowmaps for the directional, spot and omnidirectional pointlights should i render each layer in a separate pass? or write a dynamic pixel and vertex shader (shader branching is supported on gf6800 cards) ?