Is there a way to get a distance to landscape without Distance Fields?
For example for lighting improvements (to make objects look more grounded) or for some position offset effects like wind on the grass, or lets say for blending the object with landscape texture.
Yes, I know that you could do some gradients based on objects local position or world position.
For example like this:
https://s17.postimg.org/bto82xr0v/pic.jpg
But it works only for flat surfaces and what if some part of the object is below the ground?
I mean height map is a constant, right? So basically I think it possible to calculate how far the object from landscape based on its world position by taking the landscape object position in world space and adding the height from heighmap multiplied by it’s scale and then subtruct this from object position…
Distance Fields are pretty heavy in thermes of occlusion. And in open world games 50-80% ocllusion is coming from the ground. I guess you can solve this just by getting the value that showing how far the object (or pixel) from the landscape.
Is there any solution that already exist in UE4 to solve such things? If not then I think that they should really add this )