Texturing Opengl Terrain?

Question

What is the best way to texture terrain made from quads in OpenGL? I have around 30 different textures I want to have for my terrains (1 texture per terrain type, so 30 terrain types) and would like to have smooth transitions between any two of the terrains.

I have been doing some browsing on the web and found that there are many different methods, including 3d texturing, Alpha channels, blending, and using shaders. However, which of these is the most efficient and can handle the amount of textures I am looking to use? For example: This popular answer describes how to use some techniques, but since the mixmap only has 4 properties (RGBA) and so can only support 4 textures.

I should also note that I know nothing about shaders, so non-shader required techniques would be preferable.

Answer 1

One alternative to texture splatting is to use a clipmap to render a "megatexture". With this approach, you have a single large texture that represents your entire terrain, and you avoid filling up your RAM by loading different parts of it with only as much detail as is actually needed to render it based on the viewer's current position. (Distant parts of the terrain can't be seen at full detail, so there's no need to load them at full detail.)

The advantage of this approach is its artistic freedom: you can place fine details anywhere you want in the texture, without regard to the vertex grid. The disadvantage is that it's rather complex to implement, and the entire clipmap has to be stored somewhere, probably in a big file on disk, so that you can load parts of it into RAM as needed.