I'm trying to decide how best to texture a Chunked LOD terrain. I could either blend between various tiled terrain textures whenever a chunk is loaded into memory, or I could load an image from disk and use it directly as the texture for that chunk. I find myself unable to decide between the two options. Consider: With blending, the closer you get to the root of the quadtree the more distinct terrain types are likely to be present within each chunk. Whereas rendering a leaf chunk may require blending between four distinct terrain types, that chunk's parent may require blending between sixteen (four per child). This means multiple passes and just as many more blend maps, thus increasing processing and storage space requirements. To make things worse, the need to share borders with neighboring tiles (to avoid artifacts due to texture filtering) means that even a leaf chunk may require blending between more than four different terrain types. An alternative to the above is to load an image directly from disk and use that as the chunk's texture. Unfortunately, storing a unique image for each terrain chunk may require greater storage space than storing only tiles along with the information necessary to blend between them. Although it's possible to significantly reduce memory requirements by creating a compressed texture pyramid (as for Geoclipmaps), I'm still concerned that it may require too much memory. Of course, it's possible to combine both techniques, with blending for the finer levels and unique images for the coarser levels. Even so, unless blending is restricted to the leaves of the quadtree (which might not provide a sufficient storage-space advantage), blending between tiles at anything other than the leaves is still more complicated than I'd like it to be. What do you think?

For terrain meshes I've decided to use skirts instead of stitching the edges together because otherwise the blending between LOD levels becomes too difficult for me to understand and implement. Skirts are conceptually ugly, but they make blending between LOD levels a trivial matter.

With regard to my original post, when I speak of stitching I am talking about stitching together pregenerated textures that together make up the terrain's surface, similar to megatextures. Also, when I speak of sharing edges I am referring to duplicating texture edges rather than mesh edges, in order to avoid artifacts from texture filtering.

I wish to minimize storage space requirements through texture blending, but I can't think of a way to do so that isn't significantly complicated by the quadtree structure of Chunked LOD.