Terrain/landscapes: Erosion filters, or tons of handplaced rocks?
So in my quest to make a high quality, game-ready landscape, and after getting rather well acquainted with World Machine, I'm a bit conflicted.
When designing a playable environment, and being conscious of level boundaries, is it best to use erosion filters, or just forego them altogether and hand place tons of scaled/rotated spammy piles of rocks on slopey bits and boundaries? It seems to me the two techniques are mutually exclusive... it doesn't make much sense to use WM for nice erosion if you're just going to cover it up with rocks, and if you're going to go the spammy rock route, you pretty much have to commit to it and do it everywhere, or it doesn't look right.
What do you think? Are there any examples out there of combining the two techniques?
When designing a playable environment, and being conscious of level boundaries, is it best to use erosion filters, or just forego them altogether and hand place tons of scaled/rotated spammy piles of rocks on slopey bits and boundaries? It seems to me the two techniques are mutually exclusive... it doesn't make much sense to use WM for nice erosion if you're just going to cover it up with rocks, and if you're going to go the spammy rock route, you pretty much have to commit to it and do it everywhere, or it doesn't look right.
What do you think? Are there any examples out there of combining the two techniques?
Replies
typically with a large landscape you'd have some kind of technology that automatically culls or LODs objects and may automatically scatter them for you too.
This way you'd still have an erosion texture for far away. But when you get closer the 3d models will appear.