I am testing 3D engine and I decides to make some testing demo with landscape and other meshes on it. It will be somekind of paragliding arcade simulation. For this purpose in 3DMax I created big landscape (mountains)dimension 5000m X 5000m. Now I want to put some texture to this landscape. My question is: How to put rock texture to those parts in landscape with high slope and grass for low slop parts? How to put snow on top of mountains? Is there any method to choose only those poligons, which actually belong to specific slope conditions? And finally, how to manage inside 3D Max transition between two textures? I would like create landscape similar to real nature. I beleave that everyone see -at least once- mountains in nature, so you know what I mean. Thx, Denis

A common method achieving nice results is called texture splatting. I don't know if you can do that through max only; I suppose not.

In max you could use the side view and draw a selection box around polygons at some height to select them.

Illco

Some games just use a single large image file to cover the whole terrain with, others use tilesets (often blending between different tiles to smooth out edges (EDIT: Splatting, yeah)).

What you can do depends on the engine you're using. For terrain, I'd go with a heightmap rather than a model file but then again, it depends on what that engine supports. If there's no other option than to use a model for the terrain, then I'd say, go with the single large texture method.

You can also use 3dsmax transitions (you make it in material editor) and render all to texture (click 0 in max)... they're quite good but not perfect. (You make 2 textures and alpha texture and you mix them.

I allready try with one big texture for whole mesh, but I was not happy with result. Why not? Because if you take such big landscape 5km x 5km and put paraglider (8m wide) in scene, camera which follow paraglider, show landscape mesh texture as big dots. There is no detail in landscape texture. Of course, if you look landscape mesh from distance, you have much better texture quality. Because of this reason, I try to put detail texture on mesh for different ground structures( rock for cliffs, grass for low land slope,...). I know that I could manually choise poligons and then to those stick some texture. But for big mesh, this is to much painfull.

I could use heightmap, because engine support this too. I use TrueVision 3D as the engine( www.truevision3d.com). In heightmap you can't have a holes in landscape, natural bridges, cliffs with angle more than 90deg. So, I decide to make entire level in 3D Max and now I search for the best way how to paint this landscape and still have good texture quality even at close look.

Denis