Question on Smooth Terrain Optimization

Reading up on some threads about Smooth Terrain optimizations (including this very helpful blog post), I noticed that there’s a lot of mentions about partially filled voxels (voxels not 0 [Air] or 1 [Full]) and how they can take up a lot of redundant memory for terrain.

What is the extent of this memory impact? Is it severe? Should I be doing everything in my power to reduce it?

Is there more info on this and how to minimize the impact? Obviously there will always be partial voxels just because things would be cubic without it, but if there’s, say, a command line I could just run that rounds nearly full voxels up to 1 or nearly empty voxels down to 0, would that even work?

Any insight for this would be appreciated.

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Have you tried to do any memory profiling with the base case (unoptimized) and an attempt to optimize it? It would tell you for your case if it is significant or not, which I have a feeling it isn’t unless your map is massive.

Because I know nothing about the coding behind it, or how I’d even start, my basic method of terrain optimization is removing the noise within solid terrain groups and making sure there aren’t any weird edge cases in sections. This works to make the terrain cleaner, but many times the actual performance hardly changes for the amount of time invested.

And as my maps get more complex and larger, I can’t afford to invest hours smoothing out my terrain if there’s a code that can just easily round it out for me and avoid human error/me missing areas.