Terrain rendering (avoid dbl shadow, num detail textures)

Hallo,

terrain textures often have some real world light source casting shadows baked into the image data. Like in this example (with slightly too large stones):


So there are areas that are a) in engine-generated shadow and/or b) areas that are in baked image data shadow. This might make up too much of contrast within engine-aware shadow areas.

No wonder, of course, with such a simple setup like the one I’ve made here


but the material-exit node doesn’t seem to have a “engine should apply that much of direct sunlight shadow even if it thinks the area is in sunlight”-pin (for the default-lit material type at least).

Also, the terrain documentation strongly recommends to not use much more than 3 detail textures, without mentioning reasons for that. IIRC, even my GF2MX (with CPU vertex pipeline) had so many texture samplers, and I have a strong preference to work with something like 8. Any probs to expect from that?