Here is a nice sunset walk with some test plants using the alpha clipping option in the detail models! I had to reduce the trees some so Quest 2 can handle it better. I will eventually have more lush areas vs dry areas with different grass blocks and plants. The palm trees will be clustered in these lush areas so there won’t be as many but it will look more natural.
I am quickly realizing the SRP batching even when it is working well isn’t going to cut it for lots of smaller terrain details. In these scenes it is usually dropping draw calls from many hundreds to under fifty. But it has overhead and I am running into performance walls here with Quest 2 which is my baseline.
It is definitely time to work on block models which could handle things like smaller grass and flower details better. These would be meshed into the chunks directly and the only overhead is additional vertices/triangles to render. I also need to start making my own block textures and building an atlas based on what is defined for the regions.
I feel the lighting can work the same way with the block models by introducing some amount of occlusion in the blocks they occupy. You will notice that here when I throw down the torch at the end. The plants block the light some just like the rocks.
