Texturing large terrains in 3ds Max

#1

Hey everyone,

I have a question regarding texturing and shading a terrain in 3ds Max.

Lets say I have created a terrain in a third party application and exported the heightmap.
Then I brought the terrain in via displacement modifier on a plane with enough resolution.

How would you start texturing it? The only way I can imagine is, that you export other maps too, which you usually do like in world machine e.g the flow map and stuff like a mask.

So my idea would be creating a multi/sub-objekt material in Max and create a material for instance “grass” with a texture on it as composite, then assign a mask where on the terrain is grass and where rock and so on. But it doesnt work right. The terrain doesnt use the mask.
Or would you use the exported color map?

In short: Import terrain - Create multi/sub-obj - Create material #1 - Edit material #1 - Assign texture on composite - Use mask for Material #1 area - Create material #2…

Other suggestion is to use the composite material and not a multi/sub-obj but dont know how to use it right or if it would fit there.
Im not quite experienced in using masks as you may notice…

Sincerly ElGreco

#2

No reason for a multisub, a composite map is all you need (or possibly a composite material). As for how it works, it’s just like photoshop. Have a grass map that puts grass everywhere, then have a mask that’s black and white, white will place the grass, black will reveal the layer below. Then build up a number of maps or materials to texture the terrain.

  • Neil
#3

Ok thanks, but I’ve got another related question…

The displacement resolution. Does it express the contained poly resolution for instance
a 512x512 diesplacement map contains 262144 of poly information baked and a 2048x2048
approx 4.100.000 million poly information. That means the higher the texture resolution the higher the detail quality because of more saved and used polys. But is the displ. resolution relevant for the scale of a terrain e.g. in an game-engine? Because I always thaught 256x256 terrains are really small or do they are same as 8192x8192 only with less resolution? And can you scale a terrain in an engine? ( Ok thats not topic related ). And then last question: The diffuse texture for example. Does it make sense to use a color map with a way higher resolution than the displacement resolution? Or will this have no effect? The goal would be for example to achieve a small terrain ( but detailed so high resolution disp? ) with high resolution color map ( but is this possible with a lower disp. map if small terrains only able by small resolutions ).

Hope that are not too many questions and hope you understand my points… Thx!