Hello! I am trying to improve ocean material by adding some physical waves. Originally, my ocean was just 1 big polygon, but to allow deformation, I had to enable tessellation for the ocean material.
But it doesn’t seem to do anything to my mesh? If I switch to wireframe view, it’s still one big polygon and it animates as one big part still.
Thinking perhaps tesselation doesn’t know what to do with 1 lone polygon or the plane basic shape provided in-engine having some unknown limitations, I made my own plane with a few more polygons and replaced it with that.
But it still doesn’t tessellate? I can increase and decrease the polycount of the source mesh, and it’s reflected correctly in the wireframe view, but no amount of tessellation seems to appear.
The material appears to be tessellating correctly in the previews of the example meshes.
I also have tessellation working for other parts of my environment, like my landscape.
I don’t think the wireframe view in the level viewport actually shows you tessellation wireframes. Anyways, I added a scaled-up plane to the scene and it looked like it did nothing. Then I cranked the “tessellation multiplier” to 10 (on the material output node) and it started working again. I think that might be all you need. Bigger polygons = bigger tessellation multiplier.
Can any of you explain me what the hell any of you two did? I am at loss here. The tessellation is weird in UE4. I am using Megascans for Quixel, they look perfect in there, such as tree textures and ground textures, tessellated nicely, but I can’t get mine to that level, it ends up like sharp hills and needles, basically the plane or cube are two objects that have very low polygon or triangle amount, where on the sphere it works beautifully when I tessellate my texture mega scans.
I tried to find a way how to edit mesh, but I just seem to be unable to either understand how it works, or it’s not possible within UE4 and I have to use blender to create planes with higher triangle/polygon counts? What’s the magic here?
All the objects from Quixel imports really nicely, table and other stuff are really detailed in shapes and aren’t flat that much, but importing surface textures it becomes a flat poop… When I browse the texture in material editor, and switch to plane or cube, it looks like I need it to look, but in the world it’s just sharp hills and sharp mountains, like needles trying to poke through a cloth and pushing it upwards instead of penetrating cloth, or opposite, it remains flat in world when I adjust in the material editor in which I manage to bring it to the level of how I see it in Quixel preview, but unable to have the beautiful detailed tessellation.
I seriously don’t understand, I can’t find a legit info to my problem, everywhere where I look it’s just a tutorial how-to make something to tessellate and on a sphere, but I need it on a ground.
You can decide how many levels of tesselation there are in UE, but it’s very temperamental it seems and stops at a rather low level.
I just had to make my base mesh have enough polygons to where the tesselation could do the rest to where displacement would work decently well, which sucks because that means my mesh has a much larger amount of polygons than it needs to in the distance. (I can’t use LODs as it’s an omnipresent water plane, it will also always be close)
If you get sharp spikes, that suggests not enough polygons to work with. Unlike normal maps which fakes deformation, displacement *actually, *deforms the mesh and needs enough details as to where you would be able to actually model those details in yourself.
Yea, I know that it’s the issue of having low polygons/triangles if I get spikes, hence why working with sphere it has near perfect tessellation, while plane and cube has very low amount, and sadly I need plane for the ground, so that I can get cinematic or photo realistic screenshots of the scene, and not to have flat surface that imitates depth.
While imitation is fine for performance, I am not really trying to create a game, but a scenic model of sort, sadly all the professional tutorials, including Epic Games Unreal Engine guys, skipping such things, because for them this whole thing of using multiple softwares to do a single thing is a common practice, where for me, or any newcomer it isn’t so obvious. While I have a pre-existing knowledge of how usually things work out, there are things that seriously bothers me quite a lot, always the simple things that I think should me very easily implemented within a Engine rather than have different softwares. Hopefully UE5 will have more new-user friendly tools to work with without using 2-3 additional softwares, but I doubt, though as I saw, they eliminate few additional steps that designers had to do when bringing things in UE from 3rd party softwares.
I am not asking for an ultimate engine editing tool, but regulating polygon/triangle amount sounds pretty basic things to have, a simple slider that is clearly visible without doing 30 additional clicks to find it and enable it, I mean, it’s not a sculpting or modelling software, but it has objects you can place, and why have objects, that you can place, but you are really stripped form some obvious basic functionalities that shouldn’t be hard to have, and requires something like Blender just to work with polygons, why have those objects in first place then(?). It’s one these sort of things that really annoys me.
For an amateur this should be really friendly to have before you have to learn modelling, simulation, and other type of softwares that are more mediocre to advanced to expert levels, because I think that doing stuff in Engine is easier than doing it in Blender for starters, and it should be as easy as possible.
But okey, I guess I will try to get those polygons in Blender. I once tried actually, but importing back to UE from Blender created some weird visual, like, it wasn’t as simple as exporting from UE to Blender, after some setting alternation and bringing it back, I had to tinker with material editor and those nodes and whatnot else, which to me, at the moment, is a complicated thing to understand since I have no idea how to start to figure it out so that I can understand the material editor and how to work with nodes, or what are those things called exactly.
Considering you can’t build anything remotely decent (except terrain) without actually using a real 3D modeling application, it’s probably difficult to justify adding parametric primitives to the engine.
Because they’re intended to be for situations when you just need a placeholder mesh and it doesn’t matter how many subdivisions it has, which is the case 99.999999% of the time.