A bunch of the marketplace environments have what I generally refer to as landscape “vista” meshes, which are just low-poly background meshes that you can place around the edges of your primary landscape to extend its perceived distance. I’m currently using some temp meshes from a marketplace package until I can make some actual landscape-fitting ones for this dataset, but here’s an example (first to show how ugly it is, second to show how little it matters in the core of the level) below.
The general idea – for me at least – is to refine my actual landscape dataset a bit, and then create a tiling “skirt” in world machine that I export as a mesh and adjust in maya to get it appropriately low-poly. And also create static diffuse (not albedo, just diffuse) and normal maps instead of the more expensive material for the core landscape.
Thanks for that mittense, for my map it would really make a big difference, but I can’t seem to find anything free on the marketplace that I could use, is there any that you’ve come across or recommend?
None of the ones I had could be shared; I just exported a quick mesh based on a (vastly) simplified version of a terrain dataset I’m working on, but I didn’t have time to setup a material nor export all of the layer maps (it takes about 3-4 hours). But this is a fairly simple mesh (24k polys) and its edges are fairly level so you should be able to place them and rotate/scale them to fit with each other without anything too awful looking.