Effective terrain textures are important in a game level. The difficulty is creating a texture with as little visible seams as possible. In Unity you can manually 'paint' the ground surface with multiple textures and blend them over one another to create a natural looking ground. Before I could paint it, I wanted to create all of the terrain textures I'd be using from scratch.
For the grass texture, I started by painting a soil base which I could have visible in some areas of the grass.
On top of that I painted a grass base colour layer, and added highlights for both the mud and grass layers. Then there is a photo texture layer, where I have an image I've taken and set it to multiply so that it is slightly visible but doesn't cover the details I'd already painted. I found this gave a better result than trying to paint grass blades which looked too cartoon-like. Then I added another colour layer on top so that the photo texture blended better with the other painted layers. I erased sections of the painted layers so that parts of soil are visible beneath the grass. I've repeated this process in another file so that I have some variations of grass textures to blend into one another - this stops the ground texture looking too repetitive.
Below you can see the terrain options in Unity. This is how you apply textures to the terrain surface, as well as altering the terrain itself and adding foliage to the scene. There are a variety of brushes that you can use to paint the terrain with, so I have used a combination of these brushes set to differing levels of opacity. From a distance the textures do look very repetitive, however once you are viewing it from the player's perspective the appearance is much better.
I've also created a gravel texture which I will use to create paths.
