1016064 trees

[hallatore]

@J. J. Franzen;264901

I looked at your other post and was wondering, you are implementing the bp node in C++, but are you building off the existing foliage system, or making your own? And are you extending the instanced static mesh class or the hierarchical instanced static mesh node? I’m asking since I’m working with Zeustiak on his random map generator and we’ve kind of gotten stuck in the trees. They are killing our frame rate. We are using the HISM node to make our forests, but the impact on frame rate is not what we had hoped. Are we just going too far by trying to use individual trees to build the forest? Do I need to make a more simplified universal “forest” mesh? Any advice would be appreciated.

Disclaimer: I’ve never coded C++ or in Unreal before, and I picked it up 5 days ago. So I might not be doing it correctly all the time.

The blueprint is based on AActor.
I have a StaticMesh property where i set the tree mesh.
Then I create a UHierarchicalInstancedStaticMeshComponent and set the static mesh that was given in the property. I don’t think there is a difference if I use UInstancedStaticMeshComponent or the other, but UHierarchicalInstancedStaticMeshComponent is newer and supposed to be used with foliage (Someone said somewhere). But I’m not sure I get any advantages from it because I don’t know exactly what is different between the two.
Then I generate my FVector’s where I want to spawn trees, and for each I do HierarchicalInstancedStaticMeshComponent->AddInstance(transform);

Btw: I’ve made two blueprints so far. One for trees which is a lot like the one coming in 4.8. And one for foliage that has 9x9 tiles where the tiles “follow” the player around. I’m planning on using a tiling system for the trees also, so that I can spawn trees regardless if the world is 10km2 or 100.000km2

Here is a demo of how the tiling works.
The foliagegenerator has a minimum of 81 meshes (1 pr 81 tiles since it’s 9x9). Lets say tile row index 0 is at the top, and 8 at the bottom. If I move 1 tile-length up, the code moves the 8 row up, then the 7, etc. So the area is always center to the character.
Since all instances are added at start, all I do is move them around. I never delete or add new instances.

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Then I make it 7000 large in radius and make it spawn 100 meshes pr tile.

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Then I copy&paste it and make the new one 15000 large.

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Here is the exact same scene with a grass texture on the landscape.

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