Edit: Added grungeosities and some sort of weird terrain details.. I need better ways to handle terrain textures in Unity, blurry and ugly blends are only acceptable from a huge distance.. It would also be great if I could carve holes in the terrain for all sorts of cool stuff. Procedural terrain that you can carve and grow things on, based on maps you could paint or import.. or create procedurally.. would be awesome. But maybe overkill, dunno. Ugly billboards grass is another age-old issue. Maybe I should just use meshes. : /
Btw no object here has unique textures, I'm assigning general shaders, so there are only 8 or so shaders in the whole image.
So UV layer 1 = a very tiny planar map for each separate piece of an object and has one blurry texture to rule them all [same as for the island from my previous posts, the one texture is basically the color palette and deals with the overall coloring of the entire world]. And UV layer 2 = automapping/cubic mapping [and I make sure all the objects have equally scaled UVs] and has some grunge or whatever texture pattern I want.. and a normal map to go with that. I probably should add a specular/metallic map here.. just to break the specular a bit more.
Might sound like overkill, except one shader with just 3 [medium sized] textures can be applied to a TON of objects and they will all look different, based on their UV position only. Which means few textures and few draw calls. : > And the surface can look sharp and perfect from up close with little memory usage.
And yeah, this is not for 'proper' texturing/shading, it kinda requires the design of everything to be stylized. Normally in games you want to handle precise details by painting them/baking a high poly to a low poly. It can create great results but it takes WAY too much time. So I want to do something simpler, with all geometry + ubershaders. We'll see how well this works.. gotta try some characters now.