Ok, really lost here. I need to texture a plane/ground mesh for a rts game my friends and I are making for the Microsoft 2008 Imagine cup. Due to programming restrictions, I can only use one texture, on one channel, diffuse only. Obviously it can be a bigger size than a rts character. I am thinking 2048x2048. My problem is I don't want just one dirt texture over the whole thing. I want to do some rocky surfaces, green areas, and sand/dirt. I have no idea how I can do this. If you want to see the general style of the game, and the ground I have made so far it's on this thread-> here . Any help would be great. Thanks.

Paint one texture that has some tileable dirt, some grass, some transition between the two and then split your ground plane up and tile these sections.

Essentially, I'm thinking of almost a sprite based method, using one larger sheet of lots of little textures thater you tile all over the place. I couldn't find my own textures that did this, so I'll use an image of Pauls that shows how lots if small textures make one large one:

http://www.stickywhippet.com/artwork/Misc/GBA01.jpg


Now, you say programming restrictions - is that because they don't know how to load more than one texture?

If you can somehow manage to get detail textures working (ie. blending a highly-tiled, lower-res greyscale "detail" image over the top of the main texture), you'd be able to do the ground like Stalker does it. They just kinda have a generic muddy/grassy detail texture which is blended over the top of 2048x2048 diffuse texture which contains the colour and value information (ie. light rock = grey, mud = brown, grass = green), it works ok in-game.

If you're only allowed a single texture then I don't see how you're meant to get many types of surface without just making a giant texture incorporating all the surfaces...

If you can only use one texture for the whole thing (which sucks balls) then you can still create tiles and transistions, just put them in one big map, and map each quad of your terrain to a specific tile on the big map -

so the mesh looks like this:

with a texture like this:

or a more complex texture with transitions like this:

Wow. Great tips guys. Thanks alot. Ya the programming resstrictions are in Micosoft XNA and our programmers are new to it, so we are trying our best with what we can do, because our first deadline is two weeks away. SCARY. This is the first time I've been on a team like this. Great industry experience I think, with group dynamics and deadlines.

Rick & Ghostscape - Very nice, thanks. I'm going to try these methods.