I haven’t used the editor in awhile, may have some time soon.
I was wanting to do a starting level / game Intro. from Dem data.
A couple questions.
Is PBR material normally used on the landscape?
Is baked lighting/lightmaps still used with scenes?
Or just place lights and turn off with player distance?
Which has a better at performance, Pivot Painter or a Wind Shader with RGB vertex data embedded in the image alpha channel?
Thanks.
Hi FreezeFrame,
These really should be broken up into multiple questions for ease of searching and since not everyone will have the correct answer to all questions. Something to keep in mind when posting. 
Is PBR material normally used on the
landscape?
This largely depends on what you are developing content-wise. PBR is not a requirement for any project and simply is dependent on how you’ve set up your materials and if they are developed with PBR in mind. If you’re going for a realistic environment I would recommend holding this standard for PBR development for all your materials and not just your Landscape.
Is baked lighting/lightmaps still used
with scenes? Or just place lights and
turn off with player distance?
This one also depends on the look and style of game you’re developing. Baked lighting is definitely still being used! Currently, there is no dynamic GI so if you need bounce lighting for your scene without faking it, this is the way to go. You can also do the alternative that you mentioned as well by making the lights only visible when within Player range.
Foliage Animation Performance:
I am not particularly sure on this one since I’ve not used Pivot Painter. This would be a really good question to separate and post as a separate question for anyone who has more experience with PivotPainter vs other techniques.
If I had to venture a guess, though, since instruction counts can affect how performance heavy a material can be. It may be worth setting up some test for the same effect with one using Pivot Painter and the other using your Wind Shader and comparing the results.
-Tim
I will be sure to separate questions in the future.
Thx
Baked lighting.
I think I notice that in some games what your saying.
it can seem to have softer look and easier on the eyes with baked lighting because of the reflection/refraction lost you mentioned. Use of heavy fake light shards, In some cases, which can still use anywhere actually.
Well, no need to worry about it for now then!