i couldn’t stand it anymore so i took a brief reprieve from learning Houdini; two days, to be exact. i decided to give myself a midterm of sorts, seeing as I am around halfway through the course.
my goal was to get the terrain into unity and see what happens. there were a lot of hurdles, but it was a good idea I decided to run this test. not only were there some performance issues I had to sort out, but there are visible seams between every damn tile.
i think it is from my work in Substance Painter and am unsure if i should address the problem there, or just clean it up in post with Photoshop. the seams are in fact visible in Painter, but not without any materials applied. due to the difficulty in painting between texture sets, perhaps it would be best to handle this in 2D.
went through a couple iterations of testing and by the end learned to use the profiler in Unity a bit in solving the performance issues on my tablet. even though everything seemed fine on my Pixel the K88 had issues with my newly added terrain.
keeping in mind this is not a Unity terrain, but rather a mesh from Houdini, I originally suspected the vertex count to be the most expensive addition. the entire mesh, including all four tiles was around 30-40k verts. i decimated the tiles in zBrush and recomputed all the channels in Painter, which saved me tons of polys, but the performance was still shite.
the profiler was showing global illumination latency doubling when the level loaded, so I tried disabling GI, no good. tried GPU instancing, nada. somehow, I remembered the mobile shaders. essentially, the issue was with the Autodesk Interactive shader. swapping it to the mobile bumped spec model seemed to solve the issue.