Megatextures! What are they and where are they used?

Megatextures are a very interesting subject.

It's a technology created by John Carmack that allows you to cover the landscape of a game level with a single texture of huge resolution.

Like, really huge. You could even say it's monstrous. To be more precise, we're talking about 128,000*128,000 pixels. This results in a landscape that is unique at every point. In addition, the technology allows you to bind physical properties to specific areas of the texture rather than to polygons.

This can also be used to great advantage in the development phase.

Understanding megatextures

Okay, we found out what megatextures are.

But how are they created? And how exactly do they work?

Let's say right away that creating such things is extremely tedious work, broken down into many separate fragments.

In general, they are created like normal textures. Except that they contain a mask for additional textures and information about material types.

Why megatextures never became popular

Megatextures, although conceptually unusual (and perhaps even good to some extent), have still not found fame in gamemadev. The main reason is not even the extreme complexity of development, but the countless visual and system bugs. For example, the first game of Rage series suffered a lot from this. It took numerous patches to get it more or less in order.

And what can we say - John's development didn't go anywhere outside the projects he was working on. The only other ones we can remember are

Wolfenstein The New Order and Doom 3, even though in the latter megatextures are only available if you install the official modification.

Megatextures have really not been used since then. So, for example, we offer to look at Epic Games and evaluate what they do with their brainchild in the form of Unreal Engine.

In short, it has absolutely no support for megatextures. Neither do all the games released on this engine.

The same goes for projects made on Unity.

We decided to use them as an example because they are the two most popular engines at the moment.

By the way, you can find an amazing amount of content for them on our website. These are collections of the best paid assets: 3D models, templates, 2D content, textures and shaders, animations, tools, vfx effects, audio and music, particles and much more.

All of this is available to download completely free of charge and without registration.

To be honest, we don't really see megatextures being developed, enhanced and added to games in the future. Of course, they can still appear in huge AAA projects, yet only in them. Because to implement them, a dramatically large amount of money has to be invested in graphics optimization.

We will not be able to offer you megatextures for download, but in our hub you will find a lot of other content. For example, regular textures, materials and PBR textures. Of course all this is completely free and without registration.