Hi there. I am in trying to get my head around the best approach to take to creating a natural environment for my game. The main problem i am having is when to use unique unwrapped meshes and textures and when to reuse and tile textures.I am aware that having unique maps for many assets would cause the project to balloon in size but if they are used in a modular fashion then it may be the best way to go. Plus modern games are very large anyway. I have included an image from ratchet and clank as an example. The rocks in the image, do you think they use one big map to create all that nice detail or have they tiled a bass texture and then painted the details in the using the shader? Any thoughts would be much appreciated, thanks.

Details aren't all or nothing: some can be authored directly, some can be reused, some are unimportant enough to be generated procedurally.

For example, consider rocks in a rock-rich environment like a river bed: large ones could be explicit 3D geometry, easy to edit because they are expected to be adjusted during playtesting, to serve as obstacles, cover etc. while small rocks could be instances of a small set of predefined models, scattered randomly according to cheap terrain attributes (rock density and size at every point).