We are creating a smaller landscape resembling something like a sand table used to plan an assault (e.g., troops would study the place they were going to attack in advance using a small mockup of the terrain they were headed to fight on). This is in a level that already uses a normal sized landscape.
Is it less efficient to create this secondary tiny surface using a Landscape than just modeling it in Blender and introducing it as a Static Mesh. Which approach is going to hurt the FPS performance of the level less?
So, if you change your viewport view mode to ‘wireframe’ and get closer/further from a landscape you’ll notice the topology changing. The landscape system dynamically changes based on distance.
To put a number to it: enter the console command stat rhi and watch ‘Triangles Drawn’
Using the landscape system as opposed to a static mesh will be less efficient, but for PC-based projects I imagine the performance difference will be negligible.
Thanks very much for the response. This fits with what our modeler wanted to do (use the landscape to leverage the texture changes based on elevation/angle). I was quite concerned because the GPU usage in this level is killing performance and I didn’t want to do anything that would make it worse. In this application, the small terrain sits inside a building and when in view would always be close up. I assume it will LOD out when not seen as I would expect a static mesh to do, so it probably wouldn’t impact the decision.