Approximated Mesh HLOD not applying custom Material Settings

Development Asset Creation
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1

I am running some tests with HLODs for thick grass/ground cover. The Approximated Mesh HLODs seem to look very promising, but there seems to be a lot of black patches. I’m assuming this is just the mesh trying to connect the gaps. I can see there is a Material option for Use Opacity Mask and also to set the Material Blend Mode to Masked.

But After building the HLOD, the generated MaterialInstance does not have any of the custom Material settings set in the HLOD layer. I’ve also tried to manually change the MI settings, but the generated Opacity Mask texture does not exist.

Am I missing any steps for the Approximated Mesh HLOD? or does this sound like a bug?

2

Hello,

I apologize for the delay. Do you have a stripped-out vanilla project with the issue isolated to share? This would help speed up the investigation.

Thanks,

Ryan

3

Opacity mask is unsupported by approximate, it seems. I took a look at UHLODBuilderMeshApproximate::Build, and sure enough, the material baking settings don’t include this when setting up the options for running the actual approximation process on the actors. I’m unsure if this is for a good reason or not right now.

-Ryan

4

Seems like it is unsupported, as we never had any known requests for it previously. I created a JIRA for this feature request (UE-282298). I don’t have an ETA as priorities for bugs and features can shift at any time.

-Ryan

5

I have the assets set up in a test level. But for some reason I wasn’t able to build the Approximated HLOD type, it keeps building them as Instanced HLODs regardless of the mode i have set on the HLOD Layer.

  • there are two PCGStamps with the correct HLOD layer assigned, and the correct Streaming Grid.
6

Thanks for the update Ryan! I ended up making a custom material which uses the dark areas of the BaseColor texture to use as an opacity Mask for now