I'm a huge fan of hand painted texture work, but have never really tried doing something from start to finished with only painted texture. So today I decided I would give it a shot. I think this turned out pretty good. It's sitting a 382 tris with a 256 x 256 texture sheet. Concept by Nate Rogers.
I'd suggest you work at 256*256. You're only wasting time on detail that'll be smushed into nothing when you res it down. You'll be able to get a much cleaner, sharper result, something thats extremely important on hand-held consoles, if you work that way too.
https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Landscape_-_World_Machine_perfect_integration -256:+256 in "Terrain Altitudes" in "General Setup" Look in World Machine at your elevation maybe you can find a Match for UE4 in this way.
I'd skip the whole high poly part, that's total overkill for what will end up as a tiny model on a tiny screen with a texture around 256 x 256 or less. Paint it by hand.
Pixel depth - assuming you are using it as a distance fade - should work fine as you had it. Bear in mind, for logical values in pixel depth, if you multiply it, its 1/Unreal Units. So 1/256 becomes 0.00390625, which should make your particles disappear over 256 units.
So I took Vigs advice and tried my hand at quick planar mapping, which took me a while to figure out but I think I got it. Here are my result. Critiques well especially since it was my first attempt at planar mapping. The normal map is 256*256 as is the diffuse.
Does anyone know if its possible to have a similar look to models in unity to having the texel lookup set to nearest in max. The low res textures im using (256*256) look blurry in unity and I would like to have a sharp pixel look to them like when the texel lookup is set to nearest in 3ds max... Any help appreciated!…