It’s 2024.
If the concept of an “auto material” were to finally die off it would be almost as good as finally getting rid of Internet Explorer…
Automaterials add extra - completely worthless - processing power consumption to your final product.
You can pull the exact same final slope maps to use off of any GIS program.
Which means you can get the exact same result without forcing the end user to incur the cost of the PER PIXEL calculations which are otherwise required.
Ps: saying that the boy and his kite landscape paint is good (regardless of what date it was said in) is laughable ffs.
The overall performance was so bad that they recycled texture channels off the albedo to get it going. That, on top of using a bunch of other - albeit interesting - hacks…