Is the default landscape resolution enough?

Hi everyone,

Does anyone else think that the default resolution for creating a landscape is too low? The default one where the scale is set to 100 is one vertex per 100 units (1 m) and it makes the terrain and shadows look very low poly as in the example below (1 light, all dynamic shadows):


https://forums.unrealengine.com/core/image/gif;base64

Lowering the scale to around 10 makes it look way better (even though some shadow artifacts are still present), but I’m worried about performance at this point, since the largest landscape I could create (according to the technical guideline) would only be around 400m x 400m and I would need quite a few of those. Just rendering one of those draws around 800k polygons at all times.

Can anyone share how they were able to create large landscapes that also look good or tell me if I’m doing something completely wrong?

Thank you. :slight_smile:

The problem for performance becomes the size of each quad of the landscape at LOD0.

You can get a really nice and smooth scape going with 1009 or 2017 whatever the final pixel size turns to be. Or even up at the 8km range.
but performance suffers by the way LODs are distributed.
On a scaled landscape you will also see the popping of LODs much more.

What you have to keep in mind when shrinking is the component count.
less components means less draw calls, which in turn is better performance.

Large landscapes tend to have a lot of components.
if you want to shrink it down you may be better off using 2x2 components in an 8x8 shape coupled with world composition.
thats still 64 drawcalls per tile.
​Which is really already a lot for the size it covers even at a scale of 50…