Experimenting with virtual textures in 4.24, It seems to me that landscapes bake their materials completely into virtual texture pages – but conventional assets don’.t For example, I’ve got a landscape material that involves a bunch of layering and blending and when I do a GPU capture I can see that there’s a a baked-out set of texture tiles which includes the final result of all the calculations in addition to the large virtual texture cache page. As expected, the virtual texture renders faster than the corresponding blended shader
However when I set up non-landscape asset the same way (with a RuntimeVirtualTexture volume pointing at a virtual texture asset) I don’t get the same behavior. If I point the static meshes at the working RuntimeVirtualTexture asset, they don’t appear to populate it in any way – instead, the sampled result appears to be just a z-projection of the composited landscape. If I make a new RuntimeVirtualTexture and matching volume and then point the shaders and models at that, the new runtime virtual texture, which outputs zeros on all all channels as far as I can tell.
Is this the expected behavior? Are RVTs expected to work only on landscapes, or is there some different setup you need to do to get the cached shader behavior on static mesh assets?