Was being sarcastic.
Looking nice! I almost always start to rough out a landscape with basic colors like that anyways. It makes it easier to focus on the relief of the terrain and make sure the scale is reading well. As soon as you start texturing the landscape you start to destroy the feeling of scale so you are always battling that. I always end up doing things in the material to decrease texture contrast in the distance by lerping to a solid color that is hand picked to be kind of an average color for each texture.
The other thing that can be important is to have a rock base that can tile both large and small together. Use cameradepthfade to blend between them, but set it so that 5% or so of the ‘macro’ normalmap and diffuse always come through. That will add a subtle amount of variance to the lighting that always seems to work well, and keeps it from being jarring when the shader blends between the ‘near’ and ‘far’ tiled versions of the texture. Depending on your scale, the “far” scaled textures could really be medium distance, and you can actually use a solid color for the base color in the far far distance.
Using mostly the macro version of the normal for any world_aligned_blend operations can also tie things together between your near and far tiling.
Another trick you can use is a simple 1d gradient texture with stripes, aligned using worldposition Z. Using that you can get cool canyon striping or layered sediment going on. I will try to get some old shots together with some examples of this stuff.
I’m still waiting for a good landscape tutorial, both from an operational standpoint and artistic standpoint. Big gap in the market for that one (Hint Hint Eat3D and 3DMotive ;))
I tried to do this a couple of months back but hit two major issues you will want to be considered about:
-No support for mass populating an area in an efficient way with trees and rocks. Foliage does not cut it on this scale. I tried writing Blueprints to place stuff for me, which might work if you go the instanced route, but then you still need to overcome the lack of collision (unless you somehow script in some support for that). And that still would not solve the problem of having no lods on meshes.
-Collision gets very heavy very fast. You can scale down the collision accuracy, which helps a lot, but if you got a game with items like I do that would be very obvious. When I tried to run huge 8k terrains I got many gigs worth of memory usage for just taking care of the terrain collision.
I remember talking about this with you when having my own (similar) terrain issues Hourences - I think I remember that vertex painting on anything that was instanced or foliage painted also wasn’t possible, though I think they might’ve fixed that with 4.0.1. Can’t remember off the top of my head, but even if you can vertex paint now, we still have some major issues with collision and LODs like you stated.
Hi,
I have created one huge map of entire Sri Lanka, not sure if it is beautiful , but haven’t added vegetations yet , only mountains, because of lower end GPU.