Hello,
There are more than several landscape related threads spread across the board and I decided to pull it together in this thread and maintain it as the main landscape feedback thread to help improve the general experience with landscape system in UE4. There are many issues/requests accumulated and are forgotten I hope centralizing the focus in this thread helps getting some attention.
Requested features that result in performance improvements:
1. Texture arrays.
2. Virtual texturing.
3. Material editor dynamic branching.
4. Improve material layering performance.
5. Allow to define vertex density per landscape component. Some areas should have less than 1 vert per meter, some other areas might need more than 1 vert per meter.
Features that improve artists efficiency with landscapes: These features greatly reduce the time taken to switch between layers, adjust brush radius and strength and let's the artist focus more on the painting process instead.
1. Shortcuts for switching between layers when painting. i.e pressing 3 on the keyboard = select layer 3.
2. Increasing/decreasing brush radius by holding down a key and moving mouse forward/backward.
3. Increasing/decreasing brush strength by holding down a key and moving mouse forward/backward. (Preferably with an indicator showing the strength at mouse pointer instead of reading it from landscape tab).
4. Shortcuts for switching between brush types.
5. Ability to rotate brush alpha texture by holding down a key and dragging mouse forward/backward in 3D viewport, without needing to use Texture Rotation slider under landscape tab. Post.
Features which increase landscape quality:
1. Pen pressure support for landscape painting. Ticket.
2. Improve landscape sculpt tools.
3. Brush falloff curve editor.
4. Vertical LoDs to preserve heights at far distance.
5. Spline decals. Here's spline decals in comparison to spline meshes. Thread. Ticket.
Features to increase landscape usability:
1. Terrain editing in run time. Thread.
2. Decals/Spline decals should affect landscape disaplcement. Allows for non destructive landscape editing. Has many other uses i.e spawn a decal upon explosion to create a hole like deformation on landscape surface.
3. Expose terrain heightfield / normal map to material editor. Sample those in terrain's pixel shader. Weight maps too.
4. Generate the dominant physical material map from the landscape material to better support procedural landscape texturing.
Landscape related bugs:
1. Grass Tool has a large unexpected performance hit in comparison to Foliage Painter. Ticket.
2. Distance based Tessellation has major unexpected ShadowDepths cost when dynamic directional light affects tessellated surface. Ticket.
3. CSM blocky shadowing on smooth surfaces, largely affecting landscape surface. Thread. Ticket.
There are more than several landscape related threads spread across the board and I decided to pull it together in this thread and maintain it as the main landscape feedback thread to help improve the general experience with landscape system in UE4. There are many issues/requests accumulated and are forgotten I hope centralizing the focus in this thread helps getting some attention.
Requested features that result in performance improvements:
1. Texture arrays.
2. Virtual texturing.
3. Material editor dynamic branching.
4. Improve material layering performance.
5. Allow to define vertex density per landscape component. Some areas should have less than 1 vert per meter, some other areas might need more than 1 vert per meter.
Features that improve artists efficiency with landscapes: These features greatly reduce the time taken to switch between layers, adjust brush radius and strength and let's the artist focus more on the painting process instead.
1. Shortcuts for switching between layers when painting. i.e pressing 3 on the keyboard = select layer 3.
2. Increasing/decreasing brush radius by holding down a key and moving mouse forward/backward.
3. Increasing/decreasing brush strength by holding down a key and moving mouse forward/backward. (Preferably with an indicator showing the strength at mouse pointer instead of reading it from landscape tab).
4. Shortcuts for switching between brush types.
5. Ability to rotate brush alpha texture by holding down a key and dragging mouse forward/backward in 3D viewport, without needing to use Texture Rotation slider under landscape tab. Post.
Features which increase landscape quality:
1. Pen pressure support for landscape painting. Ticket.
2. Improve landscape sculpt tools.
3. Brush falloff curve editor.
4. Vertical LoDs to preserve heights at far distance.
5. Spline decals. Here's spline decals in comparison to spline meshes. Thread. Ticket.
Features to increase landscape usability:
1. Terrain editing in run time. Thread.
2. Decals/Spline decals should affect landscape disaplcement. Allows for non destructive landscape editing. Has many other uses i.e spawn a decal upon explosion to create a hole like deformation on landscape surface.
3. Expose terrain heightfield / normal map to material editor. Sample those in terrain's pixel shader. Weight maps too.
4. Generate the dominant physical material map from the landscape material to better support procedural landscape texturing.
Landscape related bugs:
1. Grass Tool has a large unexpected performance hit in comparison to Foliage Painter. Ticket.
2. Distance based Tessellation has major unexpected ShadowDepths cost when dynamic directional light affects tessellated surface. Ticket.
3. CSM blocky shadowing on smooth surfaces, largely affecting landscape surface. Thread. Ticket.
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