Texture Atlas/Tiling question

[Steve555]

Hi, fairly new to this so forgive me if I state the obvious.
I've got the stage in my game development where I need to start optimizing materials & textures, and I'm having difficulty understanding the trade-offs. (I'm using Unity3D, but I guess these issues apply to most game engines)

As an example, I have a modern footbridge over a road which is primarily a white-ish stucco/concrete material. There are also a couple of metal materials for posts etc., and two stone tile textures; so 5 textures altogether. I have variations of this bridge (and similar objects) dotted around my map and so get great performance gains by having a single material based on a texture atlas, and they're successfully getting batched in to a single draw call.
The problem is, all the textures look good at any distance apart from the white stucco. This is primarily a 256x256 portion of the atlas with a fairly fine sandy texture. This looks great when highly tiled, but now it's part of an atlas I can't tile it. As the texture mainly sits on large flat sections of the model, it seems my only option is to needlessly subdivide those sections so I can map the UVs to get the same tiling effect. This almost quadruples the poly count of my model, though, and I can see a noticeable hit on the frame-rate.

Is this a general problem that game artists deal with, or is there another solution?

Generally, would it be better to use multiple materials per model and incur draw-calls, or subdivide the model to have greater control over the UVs? I'm doing tests but it's all a bit inconclusive, and with a big level could take weeks to try the different approaches.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Steve

[Schaefft]

Its not easy to help without having any pictures of the problem but I think using tilable textures for large objects like your bridge would be the best way. I dont know how large the bridge is but normally artists
use several tilable textures to get a good, non blurry result.

Show us some more pictures of your model. It would help to know if you got any texture or polycount budgets as well.