Honestly I think the best way to texture anything is through UV Mapping. If you don't know it, here are some tutorials:

http://www.oman3d.com/tutorials/3ds/unwrap_uvw_mapping/
http://waylon-art.com/uvw_tutorial/uvwtut_01.html
http://waylon-art.com/uvw_tutorial/uvwtut_02.html

Although you can simply mutliply a simple texture over the terrain a bunch of times and it would look unrealistic from far away, but up close would look real. Point is you could do it either way. I'd perfer UVW Mapping though, especially for a game.

Quote:Original post by kneeride
Wouldn't I then have huge textures? ie if i want to keep some detail and unwrap the entire scene, I would have thought the texture would be huge. Wouldnt this be a bottleneck in graphic cards? also a lot of information is repeated here (ie grass texture). Of course, unwrapping would allow me to paint the entire scene and avoid repetition (unlike tiled textures), but I'm concerned about the texture size produced.

ok, I've just found a great example of what I'm trying to do:
http://www.4head-kidz.com/heidi/bilder/big/10.jpg

It looks like they've modelled the entire scene without using heighmaps. Which is just what I'm after. mntlinstituteflr, wouldn't unwrapping this produce a huge unwrapped texture?

I can actually see the seems where 2 textures meet because they do not meet properly (ie bottom right corner)

well, terrain is a tough thing to handle. a few ways of creating terrain is:
1.)heightmap generated within the engine.
2.)made into a model in a modeling application (like 3ds max).

the benefit and most used method is a heightmap generated terrain within the engine, this is mainly because you can then implement such things as chunk lod terrain or any other form of lod. this way you can have nice looking terrain but one that won't kill your polycount.

as for texturing terrain, search "texture splatting" in google. which is a form of terrain texturing using alpha blending to blend multiple tiling textures on a terrain. which is the best method.
if you try to simply uvw unwrap the terrain mesh and then apply a single terrain texture over it, you'll either have a very large texture that looks merly "ok" but suckup nearly all of your resources (vid ram, though depending on the size of the terrain), or you'll get a very bad/blurry looking ground whose pixel density looks way off compared to everything else.

so my suggestion would be heightmap generated terrain within the engine using some form of alpha blending and multiple tiling textures for texturing. as for cliff's, i believe there are some fancy techniques around the web for these types of things, but usually an artist simply models a cliff or any other odd object and places it on the terrain.

Quote:Original post by kneeride
Thanks for tips.

However I don't think heightmaps would be the best way to implement the 10.jpg sample. The cliffs are designed into the terrain. Running a planar map over the terrain would stretch severly on the cliffs. Also the heightmaps would not be accurate at the edges because the vertexes may not line up with the cliff edge. I'm guessing you'd get diagonal cliff faces in some cases.

oh sorry, i somehow missed that image of what you're trying to do. for that i'd use a heightmap for the main terrain base and then a side uvw mapped model of your cliff and then use a tiling texture for the top. so basically a heightmapped terrain for the base and actual models for the cliffs. though i don't really like the way those guys did it in the picture you gave, i see a ton of texture stretching and seams all around.

I'd suggest 1 huge planar map with detail textures added with multitexturing.
For cliffs with most vertical shapes you'll really have to do custom UV texturing separately, to make them look appropriately.