So, I, like everyone else I’m sure, have been enjoying the new Auto LODs that come with 4.14. Great work Epic! And that’s got me thinking about optimisation.
But what I can’t work out, although I did read the documentation, about MipMapping and stuff like that, is:
Does Unreal Engine 4 automatically decrease texture resolution as the player point of view moves further away from the object? Or is there some manual work involved by the artists / level designers?
If someone could provide more insight on Texture LODs in UE4, I’d be super grateful. Thanks a bunch!
UE4 generates mipmaps automatically and all materials use mipmaps by default. There are possible to make materials that use explicit miplevel but you rarely need those.
Thanks very much for your answers dudes! Actually Textures is really what I am concerned about cos my project uses quite a few 4k maps for large environment assets and I’m hoping that UE4 will load them in and out of memory naturally as players get further away from them. Thx again for your replies!
@ZacD@Kalle-H Can you guys elaborate on material LODs please? I’ve never heard of it, are you referring to having LODs and then assigning a different material to lower LODs levels than LOD0? Or is there something else to it?
For example your material might have POM or detail textures. For distant lods these are not doing anything but wasting performance. So you can make variation for material where you have disabled expensive features and you can set up those to LOD’s. Problem is that you have to do this manually for every materials and meshes. So not many are using material lod’s.
My idea for material LOD’s would be static flag for material editor that would tell what level of lod this is. Then you could automatically make performant material lods with static switches.
And that’s got me thinking about optimisation.