Making a 3D Landscape in Godot (Part 2)

This is a continuation of Part 1 of this series, check that out if you haven't already

I didn't have a lot of time to work on the landscape today, meaning I couldn't add 3D cliffs and use the Scatter plugin as I said I wanted to. However, I did add a few small adjustments.

Obligatory Image

Problems

1. Existing textures looked very spread out and low resolution

   When I stood over some stony snow, it was so low res that I could count the number of pixels in an area. It, obviously, looked really bad. You couldn't make out the stones in the texture, and the elements of underlying grass in the material looked plain disgusting.
   When standing over the cliff snow at the peaks, a similar issue occured.

   I discovered that this was because of the U Ground Uv Scale property, which I previously had at 50. This increased the scale of the textures and spread it out a lot, making it low-res. I previously attributed it to reducing tiling simply because the repeated tiles were outside the size of the landscape. I reduced it to 5, but now I had the issue of tiling being prominent, which I address later

2. Textures didn't really blend together

   The heightmap plugin I'm using has a pretty neat Depth Blending feature, but it requires a Bump texture to properly use, which Quixel doesn't provide. I discovered that to blend the different textures together, I needed to disable U Depth Blending, which in turn enabled Alpha Blending. I had painted the textures with different opacities with this in mind, leading to a smooth transition between, for example, the sand and the grass.

3. Textures looked tiled together - problem reintroduced

   As described in point 1, I lowered the Ground Uv Scale which re-introduced the tiling problem. The docs say to use the U Tile Reduction property to reduce the amount of tiling, but it didn't work for me. So I had to look into alternative ways.
   While not completely done, I think my general plan of approach is to decorate the landscape with flowers, grass, and the such. That will cover a lot of the ground and hide the repeating textures. Plus, it will make it look a lot better in general. I already did a bit of experimenting with this (as seen in the picture at the beginning of the post) and it makes a notable improvement.

Other Changes Planned

Not much has changed from the last post:

1. Work on adding details, using the Scatter plugin. Like I said in point 3, it will not only help the scene look a lot better, but also resolve one of the issues I'm facing.

2. Replace cliffs with 3D models. I didn't get much of a chance to look into this, but I'm sure it's possible, given the breadth of Megascans's library. I find a couple of good-looking assets, add em in, modify the terrain a bit as needed, and boom. Great looking 3D assets which work great with the lighting.