The stylized water I created boasts a variety of features, including distance field-based waves/object interaction and the ability to control the appearance/intensity of caustics and glimmering effects using the scene's directional light.
The grass took the majority of my time, and includes various features and optimizations. Among the standouts were the edge and slope masks seen here.
I used the Sun Light Vector to create an adjustable mask to handle the distribution of the "faked" subsurface lighting, which was run through the emissive input of the material.
The grass allows for dynamic Static Mesh Occlusion done entirely through the shader by leveraging Distance Fields.
The grass also allows for smooth Player Occlusion done entirely through the shader by leveraging Distance Fields.
I leveraged the normals to apply effects such as this "Dirt Wind" to the painted landscape texture. I considered applying parallax occlusion to enhance this effect, but decided it wasn't worth the performance/shader permutation cost.
This shader "optimization" feature was more of a superficial exploration of the Vertex Interpolation node than anything else. That said, geometrically optimized grass/foliage cards would likely be the elements that most benefit from this type of feature.
This feature is exactly what it looks like; a cleaner method of culling landscape foliage using simple Dithering effects in conjunction with pre-existing Landscape Foliage culling options.
The trees vary per instance, based on a custom texture map. They also support landscape blending. Using a few techniques I learned from Senior Level & Environment Artist, Viktoriia Zavhorodnia, I was able to include dynamic adjustments for the leaf canopies.
The auto-landscape material is relatively simple, with a number of useful features, including Runtime Virtual Texture support, a "Dirt Wind" effect (as shown above), world-aligned textures, and slope blending.
Runtime Virtual Textures come with a performance cost, which I was able to offset by caching the captured landscape texture and using that instead of the virtual texture at runtime.
