[Brian Jones]

why not put the logo as a decal on the cylinder?

[Brian Jones]

it’s not the brush that needs to be large (though it may be necessary too) it’s the texture file you will be painting onto (Plane_Color_0.tif in your example – Mat_Color_1 if you use the default in a new BP generated texture) it is that texture that is wrapped on the object, that texture that needs to be high enough resolution that the pixels are not visible as individual squares when your camera is at it’s closest. Your brush needs to be high enough resolution that it matches or exceeds that resolution at the scale you paint it at.

Polys per object are “as many as you need” – if you are getting really close as you say your poly count is probably good it’s just unusual to have that many at that scale – it’s just the way C4D is set up when I went to move to Flat Projection and offset and scale it it was too small for the tool to do easily so I scaled up the landscape to make it easier to work with.
You could do the same with a lot fewer polys and SubPoly Displacement, that would take less memory (which used to be more of a concern) but take longer to initiate the render as it calculated the geometry – memory’s cheap now so it’s a big file but it renders faster… it was only the scale which made the texture adjustment hard I was noticing.

“How many pixels is an object” — it’s how many pixels in the image your object is taking up. Your output settings are for a 1920 x 1080 pixel render. If the landscape object just fills the screen (edge to edge of the object going from edge to edge in the image) you have a 1920 pixel wide object and you need a 1920 wide texture (lets keep it to width only for simplicity) to have a one to one pixel ratio, which you can’t surpass by very far before individual pixels become visible as squares (or as blurry ill-defined textures due to the image sampling (MIP is the default)).
If you zoom into the object 10X closer (1/10 of the object filling the rendered 1920 image) the texture needs to be 10X larger to maintain the one to one pixel ratio. With image based textures you need really big textures to get a long way zoomed in and keep sharp quality. It’s that which makes procedural textures so powerful because there is no limit to the detail as you zoom in, it’s generated mathematically.

[Brian Jones]

wow, 1,000,000 polys in 4.838 cm (at least as I load it into mine). The UV’s are kind of goofed too I applied a UV test grid and it’s not all nice and regular like I would expect (largely but not all). Not all the image is being used with that original UVW tag (perhaps this is just a portion of the original landscape?)
I upscaled some (because it makes the next steps easier) and removed the UVW tag then made the material Flat Projection – offset and sized it to match the landscape then generated a new UVW tag from that so the texture fits better.
It gives the PlanetUVTest.c4d… the original (with the same UVgrid image applied) gives the marsplanetv015 included.

files here https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52769499/PlanetUVTest.zip

the UV test image is only 1024×1024 and those pixels are spread across the surface but if you are zooming in at all the individual pixels are visible and if you can see the pixels you can’t put any more detail into the area it’s covering on the object. Generally you want a 1 to 1 or better pixels ratio between the pixels in a texture and the pixels on your screen (monitor) (that’s rule from 72/96 dpi monitors that’s not so true in the Retina display era but you should not be able to see individual pixels in your texture when the camera is at it’s closest to the object for a scene).

How close does the camera get to the surface? If I use the supplied soil image in the PlanetUVTest file it doesn’t take much zooming to see individual pixels (particularly with image Sampling set to None). Either image needs to be higher resolution (10000×10000 rather 1010×1020) or it has to be tiled many times over the same area (which always shows the repetitions unless it’s a really well made texture for that purpose) or the image needs to be used (scaled down) into a tiny area.

What is the soil image supposed to cover? The whole object or just a tiny portion? I don’t know whether you mean “adding some rocks and similar things” to be that texture over everything or only on small areas adding individual rocks…

[Brian Jones]

should be easy unless it’s something masquerading as what we think it might be… just a matter of render settings is what we think. Hard to tell without seeing the settings. If you remove (or hide) the object and add a simple cube do you get the same dots on that? Can you post the scene file (simplified like that, assuming the object is proprietary) if it still has those dots that way?

[Brian Jones]

going to be out for a while and I don’t have time untill later today but look at the help for the BP wizard Body Paint 3D/First Steps/Paint Setup Wizard/Step 3: Material Options – I can explain more (of what I think is going on) later today but the short answer is you can paint with greater detail in the interface than the resolution of the texture will support once its stretched over the object

[Brian Jones]

BP works with image based layers so you can paint pixels so no, you can’t paint directly on procedural textures.
You have a couple choices as far as I know – bake the procedural so you can use it directly in BP (with yours it would have to be huge resolution since it looks like a fairly large landscape – particularly if you get close to the surface)
or leave the original texture alone and add a second texture on top of it which is BP. By default it would hide the texture underneath but you can either use Alpha (paint color and alpha with the same brush) as a straight overlay or if you are using bump/displacement and trying to add to the texture below then mix the two materials and paint color/bump/displacement (whatever you are using) into the BP texture.
Resolution can be anything you want it 1024×1024 is the default but it can be set to (hmm don’t remember the max but it’s bigger)… anyway it can be set on a channel by channel basis.

[Brian Jones]

it’s the Blur Offset/Blur Scale in the Bump channel .psd – if you want to blur the bump a bit do it in the texture (it’s big enough)

[Brian Jones]

doesn’t look like AO, it looks kind of like Caustics with a low number of Photons

[Brian Jones]

can you post the scene file?

[Brian Jones]

not that I know of with TP (not helpful but it’s possible with xParticles)