Rendering realistic satellite view style terrain with OpenGL

[waldronate]

Unfortunatelly I'm finding lots of research papers with algorithms for texture synthesis, and no specific guidelines on how to implement those using shader language. Generally speaking it's beyond tricky, since most algorithms require multiple passes on the image and information about neighbouring pixels, which is impossible in shaders.

In any case, thanks for provided information, at least now I'm on some path forward!

The traditional way to do a lot of things with shaders is to use render-to-texture, and then use that output as the feed into the next stage. You'll need to render multiple passes with different shader programs, but you can get away with quite a few passes because your textures may not need to be full-screen.

http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/t...repetition.htm offers suggestions (and shader code) for turning a tiling texture into a semi non-repeating texture (effectively on-the-fly texture synthesis).