Feature Requests for Terrain

[chanfort]

@useraccount1

Rather than that you can use imposters, which looks better in general and allows you to use 2/3 LOD levels at best even with high quality graphics. Every new, open world game uses this solution and from what I know every engine that treats their 3D stuff seriously have already managed to bundle this solution into the engine, everyone but unity.

Here is an example of something like that.
https://github.com/xraxra/IMP

Also, stuff like the size of the world and thus the distance of shadows in the scene has to be decided before you start making any terrain. If your level does look bad because of that, then you have to redesign some parts of It and then rework the problematic stuff.

So, I just did a bit of exploration on these IMP imposters and they indeed look great. I made some tests repo here https://github.com/chanfort/Imposters-stress-tests and they show the following framerates for 50k tree instances:

• Standard instantiate with mesh renderers: 16.7 FPS
• Calling Graphics.DrawMesh for each tree instance in Update: 10.9 FPS
• Using Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced: 178 FPS

So maximum performance is not as good as Unity billboards as 178 FPS is for just 50k trees. But it’s much better than using regular meshes. I also noticed that this requires instancing and older graphics cards may have issues while Unity’s tree billboards are running nicely since early days of Unity.

On a good side, trees are aligning nicely to perspective camera. They also react nicely to directional light. The side of trees looking into the direction of sun appears brighter than the opposite side. And trees can have randomized rotations.

I missed shadows a bit, these imposters are not casting shadows so far. I also found comment in ImposterStandard.shader with TODO that is needs a proper shadows pass. But so far no new updates since 2018 in that repo.

But overall, it gives very interesting solution so far