High detail atlas terrain

#1 I was wondering the same thing today as I looked at the terrains in the pictures of Legions. The textures on the terrain look much better.

#2 It's a real struggle to get non-blurry Atlas terrain. The only resource I've seen that actually does a good job there is the Parallax terrains by Ves, but you will run into performance issues on older cards there. My 8800 gets a solid FPS on them (over 100) but the 7800 on the P4-3GHZ gets less than 5 fps. I've tried a number of different things with Atlas, and in the end the only way I can get the terrain to look decent up close is with detail mapping. One solution might be to do detail mapping on a per material basis with blended terrain. It's more complex than it sounds though, I think Ves' approach of the opacity maps would probably be the easiest way to do that, but I have never tried it. No clue what the performance would be like.

#3 Yes you certainly can (and should) use an "oversized" texture on your Atlas. Blended terrains give you the best ratio for the disk space they use, and are really the only way to go on very large terrains. However, if you have a relatively small terrain (less than 2048) Unique will suit you just fine. Generate the terrain in L3DT and use 4 or 8 as your TX/HF ratio. This will give you good results and still have a reasonable file size and frame rate.

#4 Or.... look at my "8 Textures for Atlas working" Post under the Shaders section of this forum:)