Well, being they are supposedly just rendered as images, remove nothing.
If they were actually tessellated bits it would obviously eat them up with its mesh reduction.
Yes, I did mean the heightfiled for landscape/RVT etc.
Not sure why it wouldnt work since people are not even rendering the landacape and just using the heightfield to output the landacape into it via the RVT system.
Anyway, if i am correct and the trails boil down to a texture with a normal map - then you can play a bit with the normal map to lessen the harshness of the shadow.
If instead it is driven by actual vertex displacement, then the issue with shadowing is likely to be the vertex themselves - as in too many/too few.
Re cascade looking jaggy - that too is a “too few vertex” issue.
The shadows arent interpolated or broken up by any other filter, so each tris gets its own shading leading to potentially bad situations (often on top of mountain ridges).
When using landscape you can attempt (make copy of level first) to use the retopologize tool to lessen the effect a bit.
Btw, even with trails as displaced geometry you can “double down” on the rendering of them by creating and outputting a special normal into the landacape material from the RVT that defines the trails.
You can use that to accentuate or decrease the harshness of the shadows by essentially smoothing the normals out or making them more prominent.
This is assuming the RT you use is built with distance fields in mind…
The real challange would be to properly change the normals of the displacement so that the trail is less harsh - to do that, your displacement calls would need to first isolate the edge area they need to effect;
A good way is probably to isolate the values that are between 0 and .1 in the final displacement.
On these values, you can likely manipulate the normal.
You’d have to output the custom Tangent value out in the material - there is a cost to it ofc. So make sure to bench as always.
Some other possible alternatives are adding bump mapping via ddx/ddy
Thats all I can think of…