Working with Large scales

I do one of two things depending on the circumstances and how close the large terrain will appear in the render.

Option 1 :

Create the material for the surface in Substance Painter and tile it within Painter. Then I add additional layers of grunge and dirt with either no tiling or at least a different tile scale to the basic material. That way the repetition of tiling is somewhat hidden. I export the finished painted texture maps to apply to the model. I would use this for a building with repeated patterns such as the pyramid you mention.

Option 2

I create several square tiles of similar materials but with variations. I then export those squares and tile those on the surface in my rendering app using random rotations and generated masks with non straight edges to break up the edges. This can work really well on natural terrains such as mountains or hills, particularly when mixed with other such material blends, e.g one for rocks, one for grass etc. It has the advantage that the surface texel density exceeds by far the 8192 x 8192 of a single tile.

Dave

Hi @dubtronics,

Thanks for your message, this is an interesting question.

Unfortunately, the tilling is always the problem while working with large scales. You can sometimes find a material that is already made for large scales, but this is uncommon. 

You could create a material yourself specificly for you need, from scratch (with Substance 3D Designer) or by mixing multiple materials/generators/filters with Substance 3D Sampler.

But you may also try to hide your tiling directly in your Substance 3D Painter project.

For example, you could add a brick material to the pyramid, tile it until it looks good and, on top of it, add a sand material that you would paint only on certain parts. This way, the tiling of the bricks would be a little bit hidden by the sand material.

You could also simply add a variation of your map with a noise mask.

This looks like what you did with the different noises, but this is the most common workflow. 

I hope this will be helpfull and have a nice day.