I started looking in to how high poly the actual terrain is going to have to be for the player to move across, the polygon style doesn't lend itself well to smooth movement currently as the player 'snaps' to the angle of each polygon it comes in to contact with. You can see the initial maps topology is far too low poly for the game, but it is a starting point in which I can build on.
I developed the land more, bringing it in to ZBrush and subdividing it to give me smoother and more topology to play with. After a lot of pulling and pushing I had something I was happier with, but at this stage I didn't really have a plan on how I would apply texture to such a colossal terrain object. My initial solution was to per-poly texture the objects using selection groups, I used a script which would randomly select polygons of the mesh and give them a group material ID based upon a set of rules, I then iterated this until all polygons had been assigned and then used four shades of green to the respective material IDs on the model.
The result didn't go as well as I'd hoped, due to the scale of the environment this still seemed far too big. I will have to talk to the coder and find a better method for the terrain, perhaps splitting it in to 20 sections and LODing sections past a certain distance.
I moved on to the actual skybox surround for the game. I wanted the skybox to be generated in 3D so that whatever I created would seamlessly loop on the X axis of the material, this would give me the opportunity to make a multi-layered skybox with trees, hills and mountains all produced through the same method. (I could make two layers of trees, and have one set of trees tiled twice on the X axis and be 0.5 scale on the Y axis, apply a faded tint to the material, all of which would make them appear smaller and further away.)
Above is the process I setup to render out my seamless skyboxs. The way it works is that I have a cylinder UV unwrapped with a 100% reflective mirror texture on, which I then bake the reflective result in to a photoshop document at whatever resolution I set. Because the UV is set up to take up a 1024x1024 this allows the texture to automatically tile seamlessly. Here is the resulting texture map, and below that a later iteration:
I then integrated this in to a very early version of the game to see how it worked in terms of scale and repetition, here are the results :
