How do you texture your models?, with one ore with more textures

[Xception]

It's said to be faster using only one texture for models than using more because of texture switching or something like that.
But at least in my opinion it's easier to use more than one textures for different materials or elements in the model and you can produce models with lower polycount because you can tile the textures and reusing of textures is easier too, when using a seperate texture for each material.

I always used one texture but I think I'm going to change this.
At least for big objects like buildings it seems to be a bad way to just use one texture.
I surely cannot use just one texture for a whole level.

So how do you texture your models?

edit: I'm not talking about multitexturing, just applying different textures to to different polygons of a model.

[Wolf Dreamer]

Loading set textures into RAM, and using them for many differant models sounds like it'd be faster.

A gray steel metal texture used for all the weapons, a stone texture used for mountain terrain and then reused for stone giants, etc.

I think its faster to put all your textures together when doing texture mapping for certain types of objects, such as the globe in that wikipedia artical.

For a large map, it seems like having one giant texture map would be slower than just having one texture for grass, one for stone, one for dirt, one for the road, etc.

The people over at the Irrlicht or Ogre forum would probably have experience in this, and be able to answer that question. Or over at devmasters or a similiar such forum.

[bami]

Depends on the model, for a landscape with buildings and such, I use max's Multitexture thing, which is what you described (using multiple textures on different polygons on a model). On characters, I usually make a pretty UV map, and connect everything together.

Lightmaps is another thing though, thats why I like the set second texture thing in Xtreme3D2, although I haven't gotten it to work.

[Basil_Fawlty]

I generally favor a series of small, multi-use texture maps rather than one larger map for each object or figure. Some situations do benefit from the use of a single map, however.

Does this line of questioning have any implications for X3D?

[Xception]

No, I just wanted to know because everywhere you can read that you should use one large texture rather than many small textures.