Layout of the river banks. I'm using a temporary texture (dark grey) on the river banks as a place holder. Eventually, I will duplicate all of those meshes and do some alpha blending to make it look more natural. But for now, I'm more concerned with getting the overall shape and rise/fall of the terrain in place.

Originally, I experimented with patch meshes for either the river basin or the river banks (paired meshes, one on each side). It looked absolutely fabulous, but was eating up surfaces at a horrendous rate. I estimate that a single section of riverbank (both sides) was using 128 triangles to represent it. The newer, simpler choice (terrain mesh) only uses 32 triangles to cover the same amount of area. While it doesn't look as nice, it's a lot less for the graphics engine to deal with (which will give me higher framerates).



Proof of concept for the "forested road" goal. I've scaled the spruce and pine tree models to be anywhere from 1.5x to 2.0x normal size. This makes for very tall, very mature trees that block a lot of vision without requiring too many trees. It's about the limit of what looks normal.



Another test shot of the trees along the forested road. Ultimately, I'll end up moving some of these trees around to make it easier / more difficult to move armor down this road. There also needs to be a bit more rise and fall along the roadway.



The tanks in the distance are about 8000u away from the bridge in the foreground. I should be able to get away with only needing 20-30 trees in this area to get the effect that I want. Maybe with half a dozen "shrubs" mixed in here or there to provide more cover for infantry.