This is an external archviz I’ve been working on. I decided to pick this one as a “sandbox” to learn more about landscapes and the new 4.8 foliage stuff while building a more detailed environment to place the house itself.
I’ve gotten the real location satellite images from google maps and elevation info with sketchup. Then I used those to recreate the real place with several landscape meshes and landscape layers.
Mixed foliage assets from kite demo and SpeedTree for UE4.
Higher resolution versions on the links bellow the images.
Just one question…how does lightmass handle such dense foliage and landscape size and how much Ram do you have? I tried baking landscape with foliage and I have 16GB…constantly get out of memory crashes with the trees from the kite demo
Would really love to know how you made this work technically^^
I’m not using static light for all that foliage. It’s indeed too RAM consuming…
The only foliage with static light in this scene are those around the pool and the big trees (pines and palms). All the grass and background forest have dynamic lighting only, with shadows for some lods. This method worked fine before 4.8 version because I could turn everything off for short and dense foliage, even dynamic shadows, and then turn “inset shadows” on for some objects that I want to cast shadow over the foliage. So I could have I nice balance between quality and performance, since there wasn’t dynamic shadows being cast for every single piece of grass… But inset shadows are not working on 4.8 anymore, it looks like a bug. For now I’m using shadow cascades to replace that trick, problem is that shadow cascades get very ugly with high distance radius.
I also have 16gb and even with dynamic foliage, this scene is already consuming all of it to build lighting… I have already optimized lightmap sizes for every asset. I’m heavily considering an upgrade to 32gb.
Yeah…just checked that as well and it was set to 4096. Increased it to 16k now and had no issues so far But it slows it down additionally even though it doesnt crash anymore^^ So far, I also split stuff up into seperate streaming levels and its working out. Lets see what happens as I fill the environment down the road
How you did that shadow falling on the grass, my shadow only from dynamic objects such as trees, but no from static. Thank you in advance for your reply.