Please do foliage interaction next! The Physics from CE2 are legendary

What's so special about it?

http://sdk.crymod.com/display/SDKDOC3/Bending+Setup
http://sdk.crymod.com/display/SDKDOC3/B ... Vegetation

These articles pretty much sum it up.

Comparison between CE2 and CE3, just like every other article.

But it's pretty much the same - all previous articles have been of (rendering) technology that's new to CE3.

/deleted

I don't really know if I should call this a new chapter, since I am only going to show some useful and interesting cVars, which I think people should know of - since I always see complaining about some of this. I think this is useful.
I will continue to add stuff here.

SandBox 3 things you might not know about

1. How do I optimize my forest? OR Is Instancing enabled?
Answer:
Optimize your super-dense forest with hundreds of identical trees with the use of instancing.
Instancing means the same geometry can be rendered once for each instance.
Enable it via
the Cvar r_GeomInstancing 1. But keep in mind that it is not efficient if you have much individual geometry. To overcome this problem, set the
r_GeomInstancingThreshold to an appropriate number. This will determine how many instances of the same geometry have to exist before they will be "bundled" for render. You should at least have a number like 3 in there.

To measure the difference, I go to the 3rd ribbon in the rollup bar (render settings and debug) and enable "Budget" right below the "debug" tab.
In my situation the estimated vertex processing for Vegetation went from 73.440 (2.79 ms) to 21.160 (0.80 ms) - a very useful configuration for a forest obviously!


2. Uh CryEngine 2 was better because it had terrain shadows!
Answer:
Set the cVar e_GsmCastFromTerrain to 1. Be happy. Don't complain!



3. In Unreal Engine I can set the screen to Lit/Untextured mode!How do I do that in CryEngine 3?
Answer:
We can only do this via cVars, but of course you can link it to a click of a button with your toolbar.

First of all here is a screenshot of the scene:


You can either set
e_DefaultMaterial to 1 (thanks Lex4rt)

or:

I recommend opening the console Variables with a right click on the console. Search for "ShowDyn" and you get this:


To see most of the stuff the Engine is doing, we can enable
r_ShowDynTextures (set it to 1).

it gets us all the images used to output the final image, even those which are not used right now.
If we want to see only the things used we set r_ShowDynTextures 2.

The cVar r_ShowDynTextresMaxCount sets the Amount of images we see. If we set it to 256 we could see even more, normally it is set to 36.

What is important now is the number/name of the dynamic textures, which can be seen in the upper left corner of each image.
For example on the bottom we see 2 Yellow screens which are responsible for the SSAO/DO effect. They read:
"$Dyn TempAORT 2D AOR8G8BG 21"
This is important for our
r_ShowDynTexturesFilter, which is by default set to *
If we want to have this image and everything else filtered we can either put in
*21 (which means the last characters are 21)
*TempAORT* (which means somewhere in the middle of the name is "TempAORT"
$Dny* (which gives us everything beginning with "$Dyn".
You see - the stars are important!

We want to see the lighting only so let's put
r_ShowDynTexturesFilter *Diffuse*. To have the diffuse lighting FullScreen we need to set the r_ShowDynTextresMaxCount to 1 and there it is. Lighting only with ScreenSpaceOcclusion.

Or look for *Specular* and it gets you

e_GsmCastFromTerrain 1 doesn't work ingame. :/

Put it in your level.cfg?

I think it's one of the disabled CVars.

Also e_DefaultMaterial=1 can be used for that:

Not work. Crytek must fix it.

Impossible. It's working.
Are your terrrain high enough ? ;p

There's no terrain shadow in game mode. At least in DX9...

I'm using DX9 and have shadows from terrain. Magic? ;o