Foliage rendering appears significantly differently in Preview 2 than in other versions of Unreal.
Here is an example using the TreesGen04-Conifer01 asset pack. Note that in order to use this in UE5, I had to export the model and materials then import into UE5.
The tree is nice and lush in UE4 and UE5 Early Access, but the same asset in UE5 Preview 2 is quite different, much more sparse. Top is Unreal 5 Early Access 2, bottom is Unreal 4 Preview 2:
It looks like masked textures are biasing the transparency more heavily than in UE4/UE5 Early Access, until ultimately disappearing completely at further distances. Is this an issue with Preview 2 or is this possibly the result of some texture setting I’m not aware of?
Two questions on the note:
- Is 'affect dynamic indirect lighting and ‘affect distance field lighting’ checked?
- Is the item Nanite? Nanite works with masked geometry, but depending on how it’s set up it may suffer flickering and other issues. WPO is also a no-go for now.
Yes, they are both checked, and it’s not using Nanite. The content was migrated from UE5EA to UE5P, so all the settings should be the same between the two.
Note: Increasing the ‘Max Alpha’ in the texture import settings to around 3.0 produces similar results to earlier versions at Max Alpha of 1.0. So it looks like the transparency bias has indeed changed?
That is deeply weird. I know transparency in P2, while significantly better than EA, is still pretty buggy and generally only usable under specific rules (that I don’t honestly know :). I can occasionally get foliage to work, but it almost seems to have something to do fundamentally with how the mask is used, I just cant seem to figure out the trick.
