Can landscape resolution be reduced in light of the Virtual Heightfield Mesh?

Development Rendering
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Hi all,

I’m a new developer and I have been spending time upfront to determine performance constraints for the creation of a mid-sized open world game.

Right now the next thing on my list is determining the size and structure of my landscape. The physical size of the world is ~2x2 km square and ~1 km tall. I started mapping out my terrain using a 2017x2017 resolution, with 63x63 quads and 2x2 sections. This has given me enough quads to sculpt the land, but I have some sharp elevation changes which are stretching the landscape materials. My next thought was to increase section size to 127x127 quads and use an XY scale of 50 to pack more quads into the same physical size.

I’m not sure if this is a good method, or if I should be adjusting my textures instead. But after I saw the recent 4.26 engine preview 4, I’m wondering if it even matters. RVT height fields were discussed for increasing texture resolution on landscapes. Does this mean I could reduce the number of components, and stretch fewer sections over a larger area? So that I could find the minimum granularity required for the geometry to look good and not think about the texturing at all?

Thanks for your help.

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Actually, it cannot improve the performance of the landscapes. But it gives nice-looking displacements without much cost. because this is another mesh laid on top of the existing landscape.

Check out my tutorial on Virtual HeightFeild Mesh.

On landscape perf, you can try playing with LOD distribution.

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The real question is why are you the only one (1) person who can be found on the internet/YT talking about this since 4.26 release. There seems to be some collision baking possible, and as its intended to replace the landscape render it should.

1 Like
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There are a couple of more YT videos. And I found some people on the forum(and some YT comments) who actually tried this & that’s how I found this.
Anyway, it seems like these days people(not everyone) like to talk on YT about cool stuff like Metahumans & showing news, just to get views, rather trying out interesting stuff.

Collision baking: I couldn’t find it. Happy to see something like that exists.