Dirty Ice M- 72 instructions, 3 texture samplers
Snow Dirty _4_Chunky M - 52 instructions, 2 texture samplers
Snow dirty 2_ROF_M - 77 instructions 4 texture samplers
In retrospect, this does seem rather high, what is the maximum I should shoot for? I had just assumed that you could only use about 3 terrain materials, not that you had to watch out for how complex they are which now seems obvious. Do you think this is also contributing to the extremely long lighting builds? I guess I will try one with just a very simple mat only.
If it is the lighting that is taking a long time look into the build afterwards to see what is eating up the memory and CPU, optimize those meshes.
Terrain materials can be as many as you want, you just can't have several high instruction materials in the same place.
3-6 is best, after that performance drops, and you can't use all of the materials in the same quadrant due to instruction complexity, you'll see a rainbow pattern, which is letting you known that you have gone past the instruction limit.
Instructions in a material over 100 will cause problems, more often than not.
Do any of the materials share textures?
How long is your build?
Mind telling me what your Ram, Cpu speed (not cores, SDK doesn't support multi-core processors) and Read write speed on your HDD/SSD?
Make sure your terrain is locked, and doesn't have duplicates, weird graphics on the terrain like that can cause stuff like this to occur. I'm fairly sure it has to do with light maps. If you've built the map multiple times, delete them, and re-build, has happened to me before, and that fixed it. Then again a lot of stuff happens in the SDK that can have the same consequences.
If any of them have the same textures, remove said texture from the material that is laid above it, this will reduce some load on instructions, as you will be able to remove instructions related to the texture.
I've learned a lot of techniques, mostly from screwing around in the SDK. If you want more tips on terrain let me know, and I'll be glad to help.
It's either the terrain materials or the lighting that I can tell you for certain.