How do maintain texel density across different scales

[zoombapup]

I’ve got a question for you guys regarding environment art.

I’m looking at things like Mass Effect 3 and their environments have a load of large forms and then a lot of small props for cover and the like. I saw an art dump on polycount for one of the mass effects and it they talked about using a modular mesh set and a single large modular texture for the most part.

But what I don’t understand is this:

How do you maintain the texel density in a game when you can have these super large structures and then sort of smaller street level structures.

The king of things I’m talking about are like this:

The Grime district WIP

Are there any specific techniques you use to achieve a good texel density across small and large forms? Is it all just a shader effect? Obviously the earlier mass effect games were texture memory limited (and playing them through again I can see that the texel density is literally all over the chart :))

I just cant quite figure out what the best workflow is for achieving results similar to this:

[Nawrot]

I think for Mass Effect they did it hard way, ie. manual labor. But that does not work for indie.

Ue4 has some new cool nodes, i have seen something like “object dimensions” node for materials. You could use this information and rescale some tillable detail maps/masks. While big 1uv mapped textures supply general color of area, you use those detail masks to add variation on small scale. Play with materials/shaders that stuff got very powerful in ue4.