Hello guys, ive been lurking this forum for quite sometime now and i learned a lot of things from here. But now i need a little help cause i'm struggling to solve this problem by myself.

I'm kinda of a newbie on the moddeling and stuff and i'm having some texturing issues.

I made this little scenario here:



What i want to do is use that first material to make a rock path that leads to those stairs. Kinda like this sketch i made:




But i really dont know how to aproach this. I read a lot of stuff about the blend and composite materials and even on decals, but i dont really know how to do it.
Can you guys give me a little light on this?

there are many possibilities, these are the ones i know about (which doesn't mean that there aren't any better ways :P)
1. you could unwrap your whole terrain (or cut out only the chunk where your way is supposed to be) and paint your ways with the viewport canvas
2. you model out a plane that represents you path and then apply a tiling texture
3. you could use blend materials and vertex paint, but for that you would need to tesselate your terrain quite a lot i think (i haven't used vertex paint yet so i'm not 100% sure )
4. Model out 5-10 individual Stones and place them to form your path (would look best i think)
hope this helps

Blubber is right, there are a lot of different ways to do it.

You could do the vertex painting, but the amount of subdivisions you'd have to add just to get a good, clean looking shape just seems unnecessary. Vertex painting becomes resource hungry very quickly for me in max2012, and I typically only use it when I’m working with procedural textures.

I would suggest you either unwrap your ground plane and paint the paths, OR if you don't want to do an entire unwrap, then just a Planar Projection map from top down (Z Axis?), that way if it doesn't line up perfectly you can just move/scale/rotate the gizmo to place it. If you want each of your paths to look unique (and I think you do ;) ) then you could use 4 separate images (and channels) to project them down. That way you can change the pattern as you refine the style and details.

And I do think adding rock objects will look way better than just using a flat texture. I'd vote real objects over a displacement map too.

I don’t know how far into production you are, but your current grass pattern is obviously tiling. If your grass pattern is a bitmap image (.bmp, jpg, targa, whatever) either reduce the tile amount or find a much larger tileable texture. Probably both.

Some links that should help.
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironmentTerrain

Thanks for the help guys.
just a few questions:

1. you could unwrap your whole terrain (or cut out only the chunk where your way is supposed to be) and paint your ways with the viewport canvas
If i unwrap the terrain i will "draw" just a huge texture containing both the grass and the rocks on the same file right? So i wont be able to tile the texture and have a bump map only on the rocks. Isnt it a bad thing to have a huge texture with a huge bump map?


2. you model out a plane that represents you path and then apply a tiling texture
In this little scene i'm making i guess i can do that. But lets say i'm building a huge map to a game or something. The aditional polycount on the scene from those aditional planes wont be a problem?

4. Model out 5-10 individual Stones and place them to form your path (would look best i think)
Same thing as the above question. If i model those stones wont it increase the polycount too much?



Thanks for the help again

Option 3 is actually the most common method for game terrains.

Large mesh subdivided fairly evenly, one planar UV projection, multiple tiling textures blended together using either vertex color (old school) or blend texture (new school). Intersect some rock/cliff meshes here and there for variety and detail. Add grass and foliage and prop meshes.

A good example; ParoXum's [UDK] Helms Deep & Fort HornBurg. Done in UDK but can be replicated in 3ds Max if you want.

Also check out choco's How to make terrains for games.