Multi Terrain Methods

Lets say you want a terrain.. but different parts of it to contain different textures. Apart from the obvious - and, stretching a large texture over the whole thing - what other methods are there of doing it ?.

Here's a couple of ideas I've been playing with.

1) Create the terrain out of seperate objects/tiles.

(Downside:- Huge amount of surfaces)

2) Create seperate tiles, but share the same texture. (using different texture UV's for different parts of the texture)

(Downside:- I tried this, not wonderful.. you end up having a huge texturemap in memory that doesnt seem to tile together well)

3) Create seperate meshes that require different textures, sorta cutout the bits you want to have different textures on - then just wrap the texture. (eg, a grass mesh, a rock mesh)

(Downside:- Repeating textures..not sure how this would look, but the meshes would have to fit perfectly - or the dreaded gaps will show)


4) Create small meshes, each with there own premixed textures.

(Downside:- Lots of surfaces and textures)

5) Multitexturing

(Downside:- not good at all !!!!)

So.. can anyone else think of any other methods ?

I have quite a bit of experience with single surface stuff: you can have batches for variety - for example each sector is three single surface meshes giving you 12 different textures per sector. Each texture can be rotated giving you a possible 144 combinations. You can also color these with vertex colors.

Each texture in the above rule gives you 64x64 resolution from a 256x256 texture (3 of them). Thats the most lightweight compromise: you could easily double these requirements.

I only just dabbled with this recently.

Rob, do you mean when multitexturing them ?

Dont quite follow.. Your saying you've got three meshes combined into one sector ?. Giving you 3 textures.. and then adding 3 channels of multitexturing to each of them ??.

Rob, can you shine your light on this ? I'm curious too.

John-Robin