how to make texture looking real

I know this question is stupid and too general, but i am just wondering. You may notice that in some games(like car race) the texture of the raod and ground likes so real, that it is irregular and never repeats itself, and there is no obvoius “border” between “different texture”(if they are different"). It seems impossible to use a very big BMP since the ground is divided into many parts in different planes/primitives. how do they achive that?
Can someone give me some general ideas?
Thanks

Simply take many many pictures of a road and you’ll have what you need …

Use some kind of texture generator + bumpmap, slow, but COOL

It is called tiling, you make the image repeat smoothly. There is a standard process to where you can make most testures tile nicely in Photoshop, look up the tutorials on the web

First of all, make sure you create your textures based on photographs, that’s a very easy way to increase realism. Don’t be afraid to edit them, however, photos often need filtering, color correction etc. When adjusting colors you should test the textures with the entire scenery to get the colors fit together.

If you make tiling textures, test and edit them until there are no easily recognizable repeating patterns. Automatically generated tiling textures don’t often look very good.

You can increase variation by using multiple texture layers. You can have, for example, one layer for large-scale variations and lighting and another one to add small-scale detail. The first one would be a single texture stretched over the entire scenery while the second one could be tightly tiled.

If you have to make a choice between large-scale and small-scale variation, it’s usually better to choose large-scale.

-Ilkka

The future is procedurally generated textures using perlin noise.
Got some screenshots about that and it is way too cool.
Quite sure it is the future.

Noise is great for certain things, quite many actually, but I don’t think it’s going to replace photo-based textures completely. Realism that achieved with photos within minutes will require lots of tweaking with noise.

Both are good, the trick is to know which one to use

-Ilkka

I could be wrong, but I think beginner620824 may have been referring to the borders where one texture transitions to another texture. For example, how to you make asphalt on a road seamlessly blend into the dirt or grass beside the road? If this isn’t done with one big texture, how do you blend two textures together such that it looks like theres a little grass hanging over the edge of the asphalt?

By using a custom made texture with grass over asphalt (faster) or by blending two textures using multitexture (slower)?

Thank you all, I learned a lot from your message even i don’t understand everything you suggested. I would like to hear more and more from you.

Thanks