I haven’t been able to successfully build HLODs for my project, and it’s been a struggle to find any information about how to properly set it up. It seems I’m not alone in this. The docs have been of no help, as they appear to have been written for an old version of the editor (UE4?) that doesn’t reflect what is in the engine today.
The section on generating HLODs neglects to mention you need the full path to your project including the uproject extension, and umap name also requires the extension. Perhaps this should be obvious, but it isn’t. The docs also direct you to use “UE4Editor.exe”… obviously that’s not going to work in UE5…
The documentation states Landscapes are unsupported. Which is bizarre because landscapes do build HLODs (albeit unreliably) and there appears to be no way to control it so the meshes come out with extremely dense geometry. No mention of this in the docs. Landscapes can’t be assigned an HLOD layer so what is determining if/how they get built?
Docs state you can set a default HLOD layer in the Data Layers properties. This appears to have been removed at some point because I see no HLOD layer section in my Data Layers panel in 5.0.1. Is this feature gone?
Documentation makes no mention of the Approximate Mesh or Custom layer types. What’s the difference between Approximate Mesh and Simplified Mesh? When should one be chosen over the other?
Yeah, I 100% agree with this especially #3 I noticed the same thing… the documentation on World Partition doesn’t mention the current state of it and they don’t seem to be concerned about the fact that basically everyone is being left in the dark on how this system works.
The only information I have found out there shows how to use the Convert Tool to convert a project and that’s all they offer, no insight or information what-so-ever on issue’s that may occur or how to get it working…to top it off there is absolutely no information from either the Community or Unreal regarding the use of Procedural Foliage Volumes or Foliage Types and the World Partition System…
Imagine creating a system for OPEN WORLD GAMES…that doesn’t properly support Procedural Foliage Volumes…What a joke…
You know, now that you mention it that’s pretty strange…I’m wondering how many of the devs at their studios are smoking crack…think about it…seriously…why else would they Force all these half baked features onto people? None of the new Features support Foliage…period…Lumen makes Foliage look gross…Nanite can’t render their materials…World Partition can’t seem to figure out what to do with Foliage either…
Nope, there are some minor improvements on ue5-main that fixes an issue where building landscape HLODs with Nanite enabled would just produce a black material. But overall it isn’t any easier to understand and I’m not sure anyone outside of Epic knows how to use the system properly.
I’m a little late to the party, but I just migrated my project from 5.1 to 5.2 assuming more of the HLOD system would have been fully baked by now. Nope. It appears if I want to use HLODS, I cannot use virtual textures or nanite on my landscape. The documentation is a copy/paste from UE4 and is extremely out of date and just plain wrong.
What is everyone doing to work around all of these issues? Is the HLOD system even worth using right now on large landscapes? Are there engine fixes worth a pull request to merge into my local version?
I’m purposely using the release branch to avoid these types of issues, but I’m willing to pick through some later commits if there are real fixes available.
There is nothing you can do as far as I know. I’ve been waiting on a fix too. Epic isn’t looking at this at all.
HLODs are a pretty advanced feature, not many people are using them / are far enough in to their projects to be using them. It’s an absolute joke that UE5 is in this state.
Interesting to hear you are finding the HLOD issues linked to VirtualTextures & Nanite? Will try some more testing with those fully disabled to see if that resolves all of these issues.