What happens if the texture is too big?

Graduate Student Lok Hwa (Masters, 2004), Mark Duchaineau and Ken Joy have addressed the problem of generating and displaying multiresolution textures on terrain.  They utilize a novel 4-8 texture hierarchy, a new data structure for ROAM-style meshes, and an innovative out-of-core data storage/retrieval scheme based upon Sierpinski curves.  Their paper "Adaptive 4-8 Texture Hierarchies" was published in the Proceedings of the IEEE Visualization Conference, and was awarded the "Best Paper" award.