I understand what it is, but when it comes to actually implementing it their seems to me to be several factors, as their are different setting options, and you have screen space AO and Distance Field AO, and coveats to both. So, not quite so simple. I have seen photos showing characters and object before and after AO, but canno find anythiing regarding Landscape materials or before and after photos, and differences in having movable sky light and directional light and static sky light and directional light. I have so far, been able to pack as such:
Texture 1 - Albedo, NormalX (RGBA)
Texture 2 - Displacemnt, Roughness, AO, NormalY (RGBA)
Doing this and using the the Sample Source setting on my texture sampler nodes of “Shared Wrap” I was able to get 8 Layers. I do not notice any Ambient Occlusion however. And in researching, all I have been able to find is a one sentence comment someone posted on a post that mentioned something about most devs not using Ambient Occlusion on landscape materials. I do not notice any ambient occlusion, so dont know (because I am new to this) if I am missing something in my setup or if Ambient Occlusion is just not noticeable on Landscapes.
This may be a moot point however, as I have disabled displacement and tesseleation for all my layers and with a landscape 8161 x 8161, 255x255 Quads, 2x2 sections and 16 components I have noticed a considerable bog down in performance. My textures are all 1024x1024. I don’t know if their is further optimization for me to increase performance other than reducing texture size (will try 512 and 256), so perhaps I may not be able to use 8 textures. Which would be unfortunate, as I have made maps before and going from 4 to 8 textures made a significant difference in the look of the map (Supreme Commander). A large area, if not the entire landscape, could and most likely will be visible at once. I used initially a single 8k texture using real-world aerial photos of the landscape, which looked ok, but did not give good fidelity close up.
I know supreme commander only uses albedo and normals for the textures, so don’t know if adding roughness and AO maps to mix is also contributing to performance hits, as well as calculating the Normal Z instead of reading from texture.