Hey guys. I and a coupla others have been in the process of making a game, deets are sparing till we do an announce, but I’ve been the one doing all the assets and lighting and well… everything not coding. Since I’m pretty new to the Unreal Engine, and am kinda past my skill level, I’d like to get some impressions, share what I’ve learned, and in the process, maybe you guys can help me make my stuff, in this case the trees, better, faster and prettier.
So without further ado, here’s some screenies of what’s been achieved so far, bear in mind we’ve rebuilt the map many times.
Going back a bit. The first time I made trees that I liked.
Further development and understanding of UE4 lighting led me to this:
We kinda switched the fully dynamic global illumination around this time, as we have day night cycles as a part of the game and gameplay. This also helped with build times as there wasn’t any. The quality drop off in shadows was perfectly acceptable.
After those initial tests, I made a master texture and implemented instances for each of the leaf types, effectively reducing the overhead in controlling lots of tree species. After that, it was time for a full forest test:
Those have all been culled now as I needed to work on the map itself, and understand more about tree making. We’re also in the process of trying to update from 4.4 to 4.6. I managed to get the latest build going with a much earlier version of the game and with a lot of broken bits (we’re having crippling crashes on the main build, which are generating c00005 errors seemingly isolated around map building and generation… It’s wierd). I was blown away by the new lighting improvements, though there really wasn’t any noticeable perfomance boost in foliage:
And of course, the latest work is in corridor style trees:
The main material is as so:
It’s not terribly complex as you can tell, but I’d certainly welcome any advice. Of course, feel free to use it in your own projects. I’d certainly love to see whatever you do!
I should note. The hit in performance is somewhere in the ten fps range. I’m not terribly accustomed to the profiling tools yet. And it fluctuations quite a bit. But yeah. In terms of performance, the foliage is quite heavy.
Cheers all, Happy Unrealing.