Landscape Reflections - Being PBR is Not Enough.

[Deathrey (DeathreyCG)]

@MostHost_LA

For far away stuff, usually, you put a few layers of fog in.
Check out the kite demo for an example of how to do the fog banks. (Note that they forgot to turn off shadows on the meshes and that they therefore leave lines across the landscape, last time I looked it over at least).

Pretty sure that suggestion is not applicable to OP.

To sum up, at least 3 separate problems exists:

1. Geometry details, and consequently, directional shadows and AO fading out with distance. Includes both terrain mesh simplification and any kind of ground clutter. No realistic universal approaches to deal with currently.Sun shadow maps is the closest one.

2. Normal detail textures averaging out with distance. Easily dealt with by texture compositing/ normal length to roughness and what not.

3. Shading. Even though I am fairly convinced that currently widely used shadow-masking function undermasks on grazing angle for rough surfaces, and completely understand OP, I’d still challenge that it is correct enough to serve vista terrain purposes.