Abba:
I sell a terrain system which does just that. Large tile meshes each which can have a unique texture with a unique rotation, plus support for a lightmap that is stretched over the entire terrain.
See my sig for details.
"But this brings up another question: If I did make a scene out of one large mesh.
Can an individual tris of a mesh be textured."
A single mesh can contain many surfaces. Each surface can contain many triangles and vertices. But each surface can only have one texture. So to have multiple textures in a single mesh you need multiple surfaces. The advantage of having multiple meshes in a terrain is then only that you can hide large numbers of polygons quickly. But reducing the numebr of surfaces is a lot more important than hiding polygons.
A lot of surfaces will slow your game down a lot more than a lot of polygons. So always try to minimize surface count. You can do this on a terrain by making the tiles as large as possible, with as many polygons as possible, and by using only one texture per tile.
I sell a terrain system which does just that. Large tile meshes each which can have a unique texture with a unique rotation, plus support for a lightmap that is stretched over the entire terrain.
See my sig for details.
"But this brings up another question: If I did make a scene out of one large mesh.
Can an individual tris of a mesh be textured."
A single mesh can contain many surfaces. Each surface can contain many triangles and vertices. But each surface can only have one texture. So to have multiple textures in a single mesh you need multiple surfaces. The advantage of having multiple meshes in a terrain is then only that you can hide large numbers of polygons quickly. But reducing the numebr of surfaces is a lot more important than hiding polygons.
A lot of surfaces will slow your game down a lot more than a lot of polygons. So always try to minimize surface count. You can do this on a terrain by making the tiles as large as possible, with as many polygons as possible, and by using only one texture per tile.