I have seen similar quality textures in a few games now and it bugs the hell out of me that I can’t figure out how the devs made them. Here are two examples from Battlefield 5:
These landscape materials look like hand crafted painting, nice variety of small, medium and large size details composited in a way that has contextual relation with the surrounding. The two key elements I find fascinating are the sharp sand hills that have all sorts of different curvatures and the footsteps aligned towards a target. I assume that they are using virtual texturing and now that finally we can also use it, I was wondering what their pipeline and approach could be. If there would be only a few details, I could imagine that those were made with a spline decal system feeding the VT system, but they have so much detail that varies a lot and fits together perfectly, that I feel that there must be a system that lets them handle this more efficiently.
I’m pretty sure that they are using a landscape system as well. Using custom meshes wouldn’t get you closer to the solution with this issue, because you can’t use unique painted mesh textures. You need a tiling base then add extra detail to it and the big question lies in this, how did they add the details that are visibly not on spots (like decals) but have arbitrary size, shape and alignment. Plus they affect both the textures and the geometry. Although after further inspection I have second guesses about the long and sharp sand dunes, because they have some insane mesh blending techniques. So these might as well be spline driven meshes perfectly blended into the landscape.
Yes, my only concern was that I disagree with the “you can’t use unique painted mesh textures.”
It’s been done. It’s being done. It may or may not be a good idea for your particular game.
