I got a warning on over 400 of my meshes because they only use a single LOD. I used the auto fix feature to clean them up and when I tested the game all of my scene graph entities had deformed geometry, even when standing right next to them.
Please select what you are reporting on:
Unreal Editor for Fortnite
What Type of Bug are you experiencing?
Assets
Steps to Reproduce
Create scene graph entities with Mesh Components using meshes with more than 1 LOD level. Place the scene graph entities in the world and launch the game.
Expected Result
The scene graph meshes should look normal when up close and lose detail as you move further away from them.
Observed Result
The scene graph meshes will look deformed and low poly as if they are loaded at a far away LOD level, even if you are right next to them.
@PWRKKSlider I appreciate your patience here! I’m still looking into a few things, but I wanted to give you some quick pointers so we don’t leave you hanging. Having LODs for your static meshes will drastically help low end performance, so bless you for making an effort here! We have a couple of things at play here:
For the auto-generated LODs we are actively looking at ways to improve the quality of the generated meshes. So more to come on that for sure!
For Low and Medium scalability, we are defaulting the static mesh attribute “Quality Level Min LOD” to Low/2, and Medium/2. This means perf mode is using LOD2 which is not working out great in this case.
So just as something quick to try, select one of your structures and double click to enter the Static Mesh editor, in the attributes panel search for “Quality Level Min LOD” and set the Low/1, Medium/1, or even Low/0, Medium/0. And please let me know if that helps! I’m still looking into a couple of other things so please stay tuned!
Ok, I spent time today trying different settings and here are my thoughts:
These specific warnings will not prevent publishing, but will definitely impact more expansive levels on low end platforms. In your case, I still recommend you run the auto-fixes..
Once you apply the auto-fix, you have a good case for wanting to tweak the Static Mesh attribute “Quality Level Min LOD” to be Medium/0, Low/1, or even Medium/0, Low/0. What you are telling UEFN when you set Medium/0, Low/0 is that you want the house to present LOD0 when standing near it, for all low end platforms.
What you gain is that when you move far away from a house, we will be transitioning to LOD1, and LOD2, but at distances where you may not notice the degradation in visual quality. So a house that is 4k vertices in LOD0, will drop to about 2k vertices in LOD1, and about 1k vertices in LOD0 – which will be a huge win for performance!
So please let me know how it goes, and I will continue to monitor feedback from you and other users to identify ways we can further calibrate the existing behavior. In the meantime, I’m also in discussions with the modeling tools team to find ways to improve our auto-lod generation.
We all super appreciate that you took the time to report this!
Hey Gregory, Great reading your explanations :). I have a quick question though. What dictates what the distance is on the auto fix it ? I also did the auto fix it and i can visual see the change within 1m. I know we can change distance in lod/per lod but just wondering if the auto fix it does distance calculations based on size or something. This was a small dragon egg and i think lod group was default.
Great question @AtAshTag , the auto-fix is simply doing a couple of things:
Generating LODs if they are missing
Setting the “Quality Level Min LOD” to Low/2, and Medium/2
So the reason you are seeing a lower LOD a short distance away is most likely because the “Quality Level Min LOD” is set to LOD2 for your platform or platform preview. You can tweak that value to either 1, or even 0 if you’d like.
