Beginner Question- I’ve been looking at Landscape Materials, some of them have the capability of holding 6 or more textures. My question- does the complexity of the material including the number of textures in itself, impact the load put on the project in the finished product? Of does it just boil down to how many of those textures are applied to a scene, where they are all being rendered?
For example, you could have a Landscape material with 7 textures in it, but if you are judicious with their application using no more than 4 in the immediate area, would this reduce the overhead of rendering?
I forget the name of it, but I know there is a tool, to check shader load on different parts of a level, basically to let the artist know if they are overloading a scene.
Thank you.
The landscape geometry will compile a shader combination for each texture combination that’s being used. So, more layers, means there might be more combinations, and compile time and load time and shader program memory usage may go up. This is calculated per terrain component.
But, at runtime, if only one layer actually affects a particular terrain component, the GPU will render using a simpler shader that only reads from that one material layer. (There may still be more than one texture, if you use trilinear, or normal maps, and other material properties.)
There’s also a configuration in the terrain that lets you limit how many layers will be allowed per component. Setting it to something low like 3 or 4 will let you limit how complex each terrain component can get – but will make it harder to paint terrain, because once you hit that limit, you can’t paint into another layer, and might not immediately realize what’s going on!