The effect you are referring to is called texture aliasing. Its a result of down sampling a texture with high contrast in hue or intensity. Textures that are high contrast with lots of sharp recognizable structure are going to be more susceptible to this effect. Textures that are more blurry, more monochromatic, whose detail is more uniformly distributed are going to be less susceptible.
Its going to end up being a trade off between how much detail you want in your textures vs. how much shimmer you’re willing to live with.
We had a lot of problems with that in the desert terrain. Desert terrains (except for the dunes) are particularly difficult to deal with because they usually by their nature contain a lot of contrast in both hue and areas of light and shadow. Consider the following textures:
The first texture is very monochromatic. It doesn’t have much discernable detail. What detail there is is distributed relatively uniformly with no recognizable structure. This texture will not exhibit much aliasing.
The other texture has a lot of contract in both hue and intensity between the dark green cactus and lighter tan sand. The detail is also not as uniformly distributed. This texture is much more susceptible to aliasing.
Generally, texture aliasing is addressed by the use of “mip-mapping” where a down sampled and averaged version of the texture is used to texture the polys at a distance. This can reduce but not completely remove the artifact.
You’ll have to weigh the trade off between contrast and detail in your texture vs. artifacts from texture aliasing to find a balance you can life with.
Regards,
Wab
