Microtextures and detail texturing

[marc]

Is it possible to do the opposite of Mip mapping and give the planet surface textures an additional high-detail pattern for when we get really close to the planets surface?

I have been reading from a 1997 document that high end image generation systems of that era supported this technique.
Surely our pc video cards are up to this level by now, do they support anything like microtexturing?
Or is it possible to apply multiple texture maps per polygon?

I just want to get some ideas thrown around as to a possible solution for adding close in detail to a planets surface without using 128k textures.

[Guest]

I think a texture quadtree could be a very good solution

[chris]

Is it possible to do the opposite of Mip mapping and give the planet surface textures an additional high-detail pattern for when we get really close to the planets surface?

I have been reading from a 1997 document that high end image generation systems of that era supported this technique.
Surely our pc video cards are up to this level by now, do they support anything like microtexturing?
Or is it possible to apply multiple texture maps per polygon?

I just want to get some ideas thrown around as to a possible solution for adding close in detail to a planets surface without using 128k textures.

This technique is used by quite a few games . . . I think that Unreal may have been the first one. It certainly could be used in Celestia to make planets look better at close range. For a planet like Earth, you could even use the specular mask to modulate the detail texture, as you wouldn't want to same texture over both land and water. There are a lot of textures applied to planets already--bump, specular, night map, color map--and it's getting to the point where it's almost practical to use programmable shaders for planet surfaces.

--Chris