Best practices for semi-open world?
Hello, polycount community! This is my first post so hope I am not breaking any rules and am posting this question in the right place..... Anyway, I was wondering what would be the proper and efficient way of building a large map with some boundaries. I was looking to build a forest with a few mountains and a waterfall/river flowing through. I am still pretty new to game development. I am becoming more familiar with Maya, Substance painter, Unreal 4, and barely learning ZBrush. I know you can create pretty detailed mountains with heightmaps from terrain.party and a plane in Maya. I want a good amount of detail for the mountains which would mean a high poly count? My concern is that I don't want to overload Unreal, having something that is too detailed and impossible to process. I have Trees, rocks, and a bunch of other assets that need to be included on this map. I also saw a tutorial a while back were most open world games only load 3d assets that are in the player's immediate field of vision. Is this all that would be necessary to execute this effectively?
Not really sure how would I google this particular question so any help would be appreciated!
Thanks!
Replies
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Landscape/Editing
Some good videos from our own @futurepoly
https://www.youtube.com/user/Futurepoly/playlists
LODs are just simplified copies of the original. But that's not enough for open worlds. You will want to investigate Hierarchical Levels of Detail. Its basically like taking a bunch of objects and combining them into one super simplified object that is easier to deal with when its really far away in the distance. It breaks apart back into it's separate pieces when you get closer.
Using "impostors" is a great way to maintain distant vegetation.
You're basically using your actual high res model rendered out from a bunch of different angles, and mapping the correct snapshot to a simple plane structure, then using some shader math to figure out what should be shown to the player.
Ryan Brucks did an amazing break down for Impostors and goes over HLODs: https://shaderbits.com/blog/octahedral-impostors/
Also check out HISMs (Hierarchical instanced Static Meshes) which is a better way of rendering the exact same mesh if it's duplicated in a scene: