How can I texture my airport runways and taxiways realistically?

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#1

Hi everybody,
I’m working on the map for my flight simulator, and due to the size of it I have scaled it down 20x (5% of original size) to avoid floating point errors as much as I can. This means that the normal materials would look 20x bigger than normal, which is a problem. Also, the textures repeat a lot anyway on large surfaces and look terrible.

So, what am I wanting to do instead?
I figured that texturing the runways and taxiways with custom PBR materials would work nicely. I could perhaps take a flat concrete texture from online, put the markings over the texture as needed, then use something like Materialize to turn it into a PBR texture. Easy, right?

An extra issue:
Roblox’s image size limits aren’t big enough to texture 2-mile-long runways.

So, how can I do this? What other issues could I encounter in the process? Thanks!

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#2

I haven’t had too much experience with texturing thousands of studs, but if you had textures online, you could surely split it into sections, split the runway into sections and texture each section with the respective texture.

Runways should be rather easy to not appear repetitive, by the touchdown zone, you can add rubber tyre marks, there are many taxi-way markings etc too that break it up. In real life, runways are rather repetitive except for the markings anyway:
image

Don’t worry too much about textures. It’s of course great making them game look amazing, but I’d still play a similar game if the runways look slightly repetitive - after all no runway in real life is not repetitive in any way, shape or form - all of them look uniform.

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