Bar Props: Initial release notes
This project is built thinking use ray tracing lumen and nanite, so the actor component examples and static meshes on the showcase map will be the nanite version of static meshes.
Project features:
- Actor components: 33
- Merged actors: 36
- Blueprints: 1
- Example stores: 4
- Fictional beer bottles: 19 material instances
- Fictional liqors and beverages: 12 material instances
- Fictional beer cans: 9 material instances
- Fictional soda cans: 4 material instances
- 5 misc drinks (energy drink, mineral water, cachaça and caipirinha)
- 2 glasses of chop
- 2 american glass of beer
- 8 types of food served in the store (Fries, fried kibe, fried pastel, calabrese with onions, meatballs, cold cuts, chorizo, peanuts, quail eggs, olives and provolone chips)
- The TV and Arcade screens have a material slot where you can add your own video texture.
Actor components group assets to save you time when you’re dressing your bar, and merged static meshes do exactly the same thing, but the merging only applies to assets with glass, such as drink bottles.
The blueprint is just a simple spline, you can use if you want or use yours spline blueprint.
The example bars are based on buildings and houses from my other asset pack: Volume 3 - Neighborhoods
Once you have this, you can add this collection to your projects, select a store on the Showcase map, copy the selection from the World Outliner and paste it onto your map, and then swap between them:
- Building 9
- House 5
- House 6
- House 10
You can use the modular architectural assets to quickly build your store on editor, I use this to fit on 4 examples of construction, there are 2 materials on it, outside and inside. I strongly recommend to use triplanar material if you’re going to make stores housing inside the Unreal editor, you can also make and use PCG for fast creation of your stores using this modular set.
The 4 examples have fully accessible bar interiors, but not for the example houses and buildings.
Template blank textures and materials:
Some textures are localized for english language, look for _EN suffix material instances, by default its using brazilian portuguese. Assets use blank textures on the main material slots, you can export the base color textures for external editing or simply place a decal over them.
Raster vs. Ray tracing translucency:
The overall look of the materials has been adjusted to look good on raster, but in some special situations ray tracing would look better, such as in dark rooms.
All engine versions render the glass/liquid materials as expected.
About actor components with glass/liquid shaders:
All actor components with glass/liquid static meshes have been merged to avoid auto-culling at certain distances.
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Changing the Static Mesh values of each bottle
Min Draw Distance to be set 1 (original value is 0)
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If you do not many of bottles
bound scale, set 2 or 3 (original value is 1)
But be careful about changing the bound scale value on many static mesh bottles, this will affect performance. If you use a large number of bottles and opt for bound scale changes on the individual static meshes, this will be useless, because Unreal will continue the auto-culling regardless of whether you changed the values or not.
Since people have different needs and preferences, you can try these out and see what works better for you.
About Nanite version of static meshes:
All nanites activated on static meshes are located in the “Nanite” folder in Content/Meshes, these static meshes also have the suffix _N.
I have set up nanite and non-nanite versions of static meshes, the non-nanite enabled version will have automatically generated LODs and Lightmap UVs.
About Raytracing shadows and Nanite:
To prevent black triangles from being rendered on all nanite static meshes, you can use the
r.Raytracing.Shadows.EnableTwoSidedGeometry 0
Console commands for optimization:
This optimizes the RVT’s performance with translucent materials.
r.VT.RVT.DirtyPagesKeptMappedFrames 8
About ray tracing translucency on Unreal 5.4:
There is a bug in version 5.4 when using ray tracing translucency, enabling this will likely render all glass as black. This works fine for path tracing and raster translucency.
I would recommend using Unreal 5.5 for this project to have everything work as expected.
The project was made on 5.3, but this version of the engine has problems with flickering light when using cast ray tracing shadows on placed lights in the scene (also on 5.4). Unreal 5.4 also has problems for rendering the ray tracing translucency correctly, this is set to raster on this version of the project, if you turn on ray tracing, this will result in rendering the translucency as black, it’s an engine bug.
So in order of preference it will be like this: 5.5 > 5.3 > 5.4
About AI usage:
All the bottle labels from beers, liquors and beverages textures was AI generated. But not used straightly, I edited all images first then sent to substance when I was working on its texture sets.
About MATURE content:
The asset pack has visual elements referring to smoking and alcoholic beverages. Because of this, FAB moderation demanded that it be marked as adult content and so as not to mischaracterize the essence of the asset pack, it is listed as such.