Ok, basically I'm trying to make a landscape for a game project and I have 2 editors I'm using for the terrains, the only problem is they arent giving me the results I want. My alternative is to make all my terrains by hand in Blender. Which is fine with me because I am very quick in Blender and work efficiently. But I'm curious to know if terrains inside of a landscape editor work the same way as a mesh construction app, or if they work differently. BY that I mean if the textures work the same way. I want to model my landscapes by hand, but I am totally unsure of what size to make the UV layouts because Ive heard that an image file too big will kill your video memory. But if thats the case, then how does a landscape editor do it without flinching? I mean is it possible to make my own landscapes while making a custom texture for it so every place you journey along the terrain looks unique and different? If so, the texture would obviously have to be a whole lot larger than your standard mesh texture size right? Like say for a character? So I guess my question is if I make a custom terrain by hand, how do I go about making a big custom texture for it without it being big enough to kill my video memory? any help is greatly appreciated thanks.

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But I'm curious to know if terrains inside of a landscape editor work the same way as a mesh construction app, or if they work differently. BY that I mean if the textures work the same way.

It depends on your target software. What do you want to do with your landscape, use it inside a game ? Most games uses a terrain engine, which is just a heightmap representing the level of the ground. Then additional objects like trees, rocks etc. are added.

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I want to model my landscapes by hand, but I am totally unsure of what size to make the UV layouts because Ive heard that an image file too big will kill your video memory. But if thats the case, then how does a landscape editor do it without flinching?

Terrain engines are often using tricks to lower the usage of videomemory. Most often they use a lowres texture to tell the render engine what type of texture is used. The renderengine calculated the final texture on the fly (in shader) according to the given lowres-type-texture and a certain amount of detail textures. Often you will observe a certain pattern in the final terrain texture.

Few modern render engine uses one single, unique, very large texture (i.e. 32k x 32k) to represent the terrain, this is done in Quakewars (called mega-textures). The game doesn't load the whole texture at once, it is streaming only the visible parts of the texture. But as already said, it depends on your target software, not many terrain rendering system can handle this.

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Ashaman