Landscape Material Ambient Occlusion Maps

[blindminds]

@MostHost_LA

My 2 cent is, ignore almost everything and use minimum texturing.

Take a page from Kite demo. Have a through look at their landscape material.

They do not use anything more then an albedo and a normal.
and out of the abledo they play with the R channel to do some effects.

this is because a complex terrain material can eat up to 90% performance or more.

If you want super high details and performance, forget the landscape. Work in an 3d editor, make meshes.
You can also do this by converting individual landscape tiles later on, once you have it finalized in engine.

with landscape, anywhere above 5 layers you start to get performance degradation.
which is how rtv solves performance really. It creates 2 texture out of everything, and uses that instead of the standard material making the look identical to what you painted but different (lower res).

BTW, generally speaking most open world (or lets call them “ouside”) games (rdr2, kcd, Witcher3, etc) have rather low resolution for terrain textures.
thats because using 2k textures vs 1k texture comes at a high render cost.
refer to this for some optimizations - mind you its very dated by now.

Unreal* Engine 4 Optimization Tutorial, Part 1

Oh, this is some good stuff here, will have to look at this intel optimization page in detail. I tried looking at Kite Demo before, but couldnt figure out how to load anything to look at lol, but that was when I literally first started with Unreal, so guess I need to try and look at that again. My thinking was surely after 13 years, things have progressed enough beyond where Supreme Commander was back then that realistic landscapes/maps could be done and higher unit counts etc. I will say, I have learned a tremendous amount in the short time I have spent looking into this and playing around with creating a quick protype just to see what could be done.

It’s interesting to here that using meshes would increase performance. I guess I just figured using a heightmap and landscapes would be much more efficient than meshes. Especially for a game that would have a huge map (I am currently working on a 20km that is shrunk down to 0.4% with 8161 resolution, and I would scale props and units etc accordingly, so that I could have potentially an 80km map with the same detail, using multiple landscapes. I will be curious to try meshes and see how performance is affected. Thank you so much for these insights and info!