We're working on a game and trying to keep the texture memory low. As such, we want to repeat a bunch of textures where appropriate instead of having the level represented by a giant texture.

We're having a bit of trouble texturing the edges. Basically, we want the texture to align itself to the normal of the edge. Imagine an arrow texture - the texture would repeat along the edge of the poly, but the arrow would always be pointing outward.

To give some games that do something similar: Hungry Shark and Super Mario Brothers come to mind. They have some textures they reuse but the texture is always angled to look appropriate regardless of what poly it's on.

Google and the GameDev tutorials don't seem to have good information on how to do this. We have access to either Cinema 4D or Maya and are not locked into either one. If anyone knows of a good way to do this in either tool, that'd be super helpful.

I could think of a way to do this with shaders, but I'm trying to avoid that since we're targeting iPhone (and I'd like to stay OpenGL ES 1.0 if possible). Would greatly prefer an art solution than a tech one.