Doesn’t really matter to the GFX unless you exceed 3billion tris in total on the scene - then you start to get problems.
And yes, Nanite would definitely fix whatever tris count issue you’d run to once it’s properly working (which I think it still isn’t).
Whatever feels comfortable to work on with your GFX on a “single tile” setup. Could be 2km^2 or even 8km^2 just depends on hardware.
Doesn’t really matter. Your worse possible performance is going to be 4 landscapes present at the same time. Anything more than 4 landscapes is already unusable with your GFX.
Anything less will obviously perform a little better.
Same stuff. Whatever you think you can find the best tutorials for is what you should use.
If all you can find is videos you can’t understand the people speaking in as a source of a tutorial, then you probably won’t get very far.
Your computer probably won’t be able to handle that - 16bit files are large to begin with. anything above 4k pixels in size is already a stretch to work with in terms of computation times/read from disk off an m.2.
Yes (note that the esri format has nothing to do with anything though). I’d just keep using a GIS program until I’m ready to make meshes, then take it to blender or better yet, Houdini, or the recently ruined by acquisition but still decent ZBrush.
Houdini comes with similar features.
Blender has plugins for them.
Nha, more basic.
A packed texture with stuff RGBA packed to different textures, usually:
R=Roughness, G=Gloss, B=Metallic, A=Transparency.
Whatever else works for the terrain can be substituted into the channels.
Plus 1 base color, and 1 normal map.
and additionally/optionally, one physmap to give the terrain/mesh different physical materials matching it’s paint.
If you then make it react at runtime you also likely need 1 RT(render target) vector field texture added onto the material.
I suppose one could try to use Virtual Textures for this, but I don’t really think you’d gain much or any performance from it.
You could though because the terrain being so large, then part of the texture used probably wouldn’t need to be loaded in until visible.
Thing is, the cost is already so low that it’s hard to compare/count.
anyway you should circle back to that once you figure out the GIS program and the height-map production which will no doubt take a while.