Large Rocks

Overview

In ATLAS, Large Rocks are a special class of asset. A single Large Rock has the following properties:

  • Covers significant gameplay area that would otherwise be Landscape
  • Can be considered a major, characteristic terrain feature from far away
  • Benefits greatly from receiving and casting far distance shadows

Requirements

Large Rocks can be placed as StaticMeshes in Farthest sub-levels along with Large Trees, provided:

  • Lowest LOD less than 4,000 tris
  • Use Distance Field Texture = True (in StaticMesh editor)
  • Distance Field Two Sided Override = DFTSO Override False (in StaticMesh editor)
  • Affect Distance Field Lighting = True (in level actor - should be set automatically)
  • Collision Preset = Ground (in level actor)
  • Desired Max Draw Distance = 0 (Should be part of a proxy mesh parent when set to 0)
  • Use Absolute Max Draw Distance = True
../_images/LargeRockSettings.png

Collision

Large Rock collision is generated using Simplygon as the lowest LOD. This last LOD should NOT be more than 4k triangles but an exception can sometimes be made (ask). Silhouette should be set to Highest and both Texture/Shading should be set to Lowest. Screen Size should be set to 0 so that it is never used visually. Below are the correct settings.

../_images/LargeRockCollision.jpg