teak421
(teak421)
May 1, 2017, 3:01pm
82
The biggest advice I can give is to watch how many large textures you’re blending at a time. For instance, you can probably use a 4k base, but why would you use a 4k micro or macro variant texture? Even for an up close micro variant, you don’t need it to be 4k because it’s usually just a tiling texture to add in stuff like little blades of grass or surface noise. Is your camera ever going to get closer than 50 units to the ground? Probably not. Along the same lines, how often are you going to be zoomed out to 200,000 units to the point that you’ll be able to tell the difference in macro texture resolution? Blending to color gradients, the further you go out, also helps out a lot as well. You can pretty much switch to a macro variant+single color vector when you get more than X number of meters away. You aren’t going to be able to see the detail anyways.
There are a lot of tricks and shortcuts you can use. Any of the big name games, that have these alleged “super” landscape systems, are using engine shortcuts like these(probably internal to the actual engine); in exchange for performance vs fidelity. Just remember that a single 4k texture is 64mb alone(assuming RGBA).
You should consider creating a Wiki article on some of your tips…! I’ve not done any landscape work, but if I did, I would certainly want to read your suggestions up front so I can minimize the impact on performance… thanks for your insight!