Distant foliage that doesn't recieve cascade shadows become too bright/unlit

Development Rendering
1

Hello! I’m wondering pretty much how you would suggest to fix what the title says.

I’m happy with how my trees are rendered close to the player, but as they approach the distance and recieve less shading, they become brighter and eventually completely unlit.
I can manage the diffuse color so that it matches and blends in with the landscape better, but that would mess up how it renders up close and makes it too dark.

How would you suggest I make it so that the trees blends in better in the distance?

2

Number of things you can do.

  1. I -think- you may be looking at billboards there. Often, the material isn’t ideal. You can adjust the material for the billboad.

  2. You can just make that LOD empty. Then, when you get that far out, you just don’t see any trees.

  3. You can make the material of the trees darken with camera distance. It basically use a pixel world position / camera position and distance node:

DT_Distance_Based_Blending_Nodes.jpg
DT_Distance_Based_Blending_Nodes.jpg876×246 36.1 KB

3

My trees don’t have billboards, but perhaps I can do something with darkening them over camera distance and adjust it to match when they become brighter.

Thanks for the idea!

4

I have seen the same. Here’s my process to get rid of these. I’m not using all of these at once?

  • Use the camera depth trick mentioned by ClockworkOcean to change color, size, or hide trees
  • Play with cull distance settings in Grass Types to hide/fade trees in the far away
  • Add a bit more fog
  • Use Fresnel not to do anything when looking at the top straighly. (I usually do this with custom landscape mask)

Hope this helps.