From Mavor's blog we know that PA will using Virtual Texturing for planet texturing. Is that means you have to paint a huge texture map for a planet? From Infinity dev: I just wondering how PA will solve this problem? p.s.: Infinity's planets/terrain texturing method
The basic method for terrain texturing discussed on that forum (from 2008 mind you) is pretty much the base standard for how to deal with texturing on height map based terrain. Take the absolute height, slope, and any other parameters you can, generate masks, render all layers of masked ground textures. All ground textures are aligned to the terrain grid and repetition is hidden by the mixing of different ground types and usually some kind of noise applied either to the boundaries (like in that case) or to the tint of the texture or both. It's more common to bake the output of the parameters in to "dumb" mask textures (ie: all the smarts about slope and height pre-applied) so that they can hand modified for local features with some sanity. For that project's purposes everything is 100% dynamically generated so it makes it bit more sense to do the logic in the shader. We're not doing that. We have some similar concepts as far as figuring out where different biomes are, ground height, along with distance from the poles, distance from water, etc. However biomes are a group of what can be thought of as stickers, models and cut outs; decals and brushes in our terminology. The surface colors are generated as they're needed by layering decals to cover the surface, baking the result in to a virtual texture, and rendering. As you move the camera around the game only regenerates the ground textures where needed. We have no affiliation with the owner of the below image, but it seems oddly fitting. It also is a great visual representation of how our terrain texture is generated. Imagine each of these stickers as chunks of dirt, rock, sand, grass, etc. layered together.
