Tesselation level & Deco layers?

[ThePriest909]

Greetings.
When I modify the "tesselation level" number of my terrain, deco layers seem to be affected by it and as a resault a huge amount a deco items dissapear.
Is there a reason for that or...?

Thanks for your time.

[Blades]

I imagine since the deco layers are somewhat connected with the terrain, when you detesselate, it somewhat detesselates the deco layers too. (By removing some of them) Just a guess though. What happens when you detesselate and then retesselate again? Do they come back or are they still gone? Either way you may just have to redo the deco layers after you detesselate.

[ThePriest909]

Fortunately by re-adjusting the "density" of each deco, the desired amount comes back. I only hope that this won't affect game's performance someway later.

[Xendance]

If I recall correctly, the decolayer objects are placed onto the verticies of the terrain. You can see them in the wireframe mode.

[ThePriest909]

Xendance indeed you're right.
I guess that the engine removes deco objects from those quads that collapse into a single one so that they won't look floating in the air from distance.
I suppose then that tesselation level must be setted prior to any deco layer.

[apophis3d]

Another option you can use to bypass the deco layers is use a foliage volume. Then you can get more control over foliage culling and density. Then they are independent of the terrain layers, which also allows you to place them onto static meshes which can be handy.

[Xendance]

Foliage doesn't cast shadows and the directional lighting on them is rather buggy last time I checked.

[apophis3d]

true but if its something just like grass, it would be fine doubt you would want shadows for every blade

[Xendance]

I seriously doubt he's using it for grass just because it doesn't spread out uniformly (some could argue that the placement on terrain verticies is uniform)