Varied terrain texturing. Would this work?

[Fidcal]

After trying the random terrain generator Surfgen that AlumunimumHaste brought up in another thread I was wondering if textures could be made like this (because of course over larger areas they tile horribly because every anomaly is repeated endlessly)..

 

Say you wanted a large grassy area:

 

Create one grass tile

Rotate it and modify the edges so it tiles with the first tile

Repeat so you have 4 versions if possible but at least 2 rotations

 

Modify or create 3 or 4 more somewhat different detail but same type/colour of grass tiles in the same way that will tile with the first.

 

So you finish up with at least 6 variations and at best maybe 16.

 

Name the textures say grass1, grass2, etc.

 

Create the terrain of dozens of patches with the generator and all textured with grass1 in a map file on its own.

 

Create a simple program that will read through the map and randomly replace grass1 with any from the set.

 

So there should be no repeat tiles of the same grass but much more randomness.

 

Or has this idea already been thought of?

[AluminumHaste]

After trying the random terrain generator Surfgen that AlumunimumHaste brought up in another thread I was wondering if textures could be made like this (because of course over larger areas they tile horribly because every anomaly is repeated endlessly)..

 

Say you wanted a large grassy area:

 

Create one grass tile

Rotate it and modify the edges so it tiles with the first tile

Repeat so you have 4 versions if possible but at least 2 rotations

 

Modify or create 3 or 4 more somewhat different detail but same type/colour of grass tiles in the same way that will tile with the first.

 

So you finish up with at least 6 variations and at best maybe 16.

 

Name the textures say grass1, grass2, etc.

 

Create the terrain of dozens of patches with the generator and all textured with grass1 in a map file on its own.

 

Create a simple program that will read through the map and randomly replace grass1 with any from the set.

 

So there should be no repeat tiles of the same grass but much more randomness.

 

Or has this idea already been thought of?

 

You could do this with a texteditor and the find and replace feature or do it manually (which would suck) or use a simple program that replaces the texture for that patch with a random assortment or grass, like grassRandom_01, grassRandom_02, grassRandom_03 etc.

But you would have to make sure that they all tile at the edges otherwise it would look retarded. Are you thinking along the lines of megatexture like Quake 4 had? I'd be interested in seeing the textures used for the map where you get on the terran space ship for the first time, and there's that big outdoor area, might be worth checking out.

 

I heard that Doom 3 had support for MegaTexture but was never used as it wasn't mature enough or something like that.

 

EDIT: Yeah I thought so take a look at this video:

[Fidcal]

A text editor's find and replace couldn't do this except manually one by one. To begin with every texture entry would be grass1. The text editor could only find and replace all that lot with say grass3, it couldn't randomly replace 1 with any value from 1 to 6. But a very simple program can do this no problem. The tricky thing is creating the textur e variations in the first place.

 

I think the megatextures are done a completely different way.

 

Now grass might be a difficult texture to try this on. Stonework or brickwork might be better. It would not be too difficult to take an existing brick texture and re-arrange it internally - well laborious yes but not too hard I think.

[Domarius]

After trying the random terrain generator Surfgen that AlumunimumHaste brought up in another thread I was wondering if textures could be made like this (because of course over larger areas they tile horribly because every anomaly is repeated endlessly)..

Don't forget about looking at doing more traditional solutions - tweaking the texture to remove any parts that stand out too much to avoid too noticible patterns (fairly common practice), placing objects and architecture to break up flat areas, use different coloured lighting, and ... usually the other thing you do is another texture layer with an alpha map, or vertex transparency, that only shows parts of it through, for like dirt paths and things, but I think all attempts at getting this working in our mod failed horribly.

 

Your idea sounds interesting, just don't know about putting code time into a feature like this, open areas of any sort are not a huge focus in this kind of game, maybe a game like FarCry or Crysis ...

[OrbWeaver]

There would be a performance impact in doing this; instead of a multi-poly surface in a single texture being rendered in one draw call, you would have sixteen different subsurfaces, each of which would have to be rendered separately.

[Domarius]

Well 16 is out of the question - most games only use 2 or 3 texture layers per surface. But apparently it's too hard to get working in Doom 3 anyway. Which is a shame, you can do nice patches of dirt to break up grassy areas, and things like that.