Unreal Engine - Runtime Virtual Texture - Case Study

I finally got around to learning about Virtual Texturing in Unreal Engine, and how to use it to blend landscape materials onto intersecting meshes.

It was easier than I thought and the benefits are quite worth a minor performance hit (in most cases).

I made this little scene in a couple of hours to demonstrate this practice. It contains 5 Megascans rock/wood assets, 1 surface material for the sand, and a couple of decals for smaller pebbles and seaweed (which don't look that great but this was a quick project).

The results in this example are subtle but quite effective and hold up quite well when close up (if you increase the resolution of your VT sample).

I have also included the before and after blending unlit examples to hopefully illustrate the effect better.