i may be wrong but i get the feeling terrain textures are applied to terrain top down, so i can’t seem to texture map a near vertical cliff like El Capitan or Half dome without getting nothing but blurry vertical stripes.
i realize that’s not a problem if i use a mesh instead of terrain but a huge mesh seems to have some performance issues i’m still working out.
any ideas please?
thx
You are correct: the texture coordinate projection on terrain seems to be simply in the X-Z direction, end of story. This is done for performance and mapping reasons obviously.
One handy way around this is to make custom meshes only for the “interesting” vertical features of your map, and to embed them like teeth in the terrain. A lot of extant games (Unity and otherwise) do it this way: they have an underlying terrain engine and then you embed rocky outcrops for the things that are beyond your terrain engine: caves, arches, angular jutting rocks, vertical cliffs, etc.
With this approach the trick becomes getting the embedded geometry to blend nicely with the surrounding terrain object. You can use tricks like putting little bushes around the perimeter interface to hide the geometry mismatch, and also adjusting the texture levels so they look right under various lighting conditions.
Another way to handle it is to emphasize the difference, say by making all of your embedded items be gray rock, embedded in a brown dirt ground, or green grassy ground.