[SOLVED] 4096 terrain surface textures question

[Rob]

Im working on a 8192x8192 terrain and I was trying out a few things (after checking out the game Rage and was blown away by the megatexture)

and found out I can use 4096x4096 surface textures

 

This gives great visual results (only tried 1 surface) but if I would try such a thing with the complete terrain it would end in tears as it would be impossible to load 1024 textures of 4096x4096 as each texture is about 8mb in size, so this brings me to my question why was this documented this way, as to me the documentation states its possible to have a terrain texture of 131072 × 131072 (32x4096) while this would be impossible to run in realtime as it has to load way too many textures

 

From documentation:

 

Here is the example of terrain configuration. All sizes are specified for compressed textures. Terrain Size The Number of

Surfaces Maximum Size of

Terrain Texture* Hight Map Normal Map

(ATI2) Diffuse Texture

(DXT1 / DXT5) Mask Texture

(DXT1 or ATI1 /

DXT5 or ATI2) Total Size 65536 × 65536 256 × 256 1048576 × 1048576 8192 MB 4096 MB 2048 MB / 4096 MB 2048 MB / 4096 MB 16384 - 20480 MB 16384 × 16384 64 × 64 262144 × 262144 512 MB 256 MB 128 MB / 256 MB 128 MB / 256 MB 1024 - 1280 MB 8192 × 8192 32 × 32 131072 × 131072 128 MB 64 MB 32 MB / 64 MB 32 MB / 64 MB 256 - 320 MB

* The maximum total size of any terrain texture implies that each surface is assigned a texture of maximum 4096×4096 size.

[manguste]

You seem not to take into account that surface textures (as well as detail materials) are loaded only on the Patch level (0-3 LODs). All other LODs use 1 coarse texture. If your graphics card is powerful enough, you can give it a go.