I am creating something like a survival game, just for the learning curve.
So I was trying to fill up my entire landscape with a grass foliage asset.
Asset = 20 verts
Masked for about 70%
So 1st of all I cant really get it dense enough to look realistic.
I plan to solve this by increasing the asset size a little bit and painting the landscape with a grass material.
But with like 500 copies of the grass foliage asset, I already get warnings that i’m using it to much.
I’m going for a look like TheHunter, Primal. So the question,
How to add A LOT of grass assets without making them drop the frame rate down to 10
The answer
Don’t use a preview build.
Don’t forget about culling (foliage paint setting)
-use very low poly meshes -> 6 tris
-add hills and other stuff that blocks the view of the player
-use a lower density -> with a good grass ground material you can reach a good quality
You shouldn’t be getting that low of a hit in performance. The only thing I can think of with that low of count and especially that low of vert count is that your doing something really crazy in your material. You definitely don’t need to go lower poly than that, I was using over 860,000 grass pieces at over 200 tris a piece and still getting good framerates. If you are not already try downloading and using the 4.7 update as it offers quite a bit of improvements to foliage rendering.
Also, you might want to post your hardware. It doesn’t make much sense that you get that low frame rate with those assets unless your computer is weak.
Yeah, I added a lightmap importance thingy.
Reduced lightmap res to 32.
After building I barely got fps drops.(2347 instances)
However, I got two updates today.
Was working in 4.7 preview 2
Which updated to 4.7 preview 3.
Then I made UDK crash by building a little lighthouse from bsp brushes (3 adding 3 subtracting). At this point, touching any of the bsp brushes would crash UDK.
So UDk crashed and installed 4.7 preview 4.
Now I cant even use the foliage paint tool anymore.
Instant crash on mouse click.
Atm I would recommend you to stay with 4.6 because 4.7 is still a preview build with many bugs. But when you want to use 4.7, use the preview 1 (in my case it was pretty stable)
Don’t forget to enable the lOD & culling settings withing the foliage instance if you haven’t done so already, you don’t wanna be rendering grass you can’t see
The thing is, Geocontrol2 claims its 64kmx64km.
However, after importing to UE4 (see i didnt call it udk4 :P) it’s actually rather small, in fact it has more height then width.
So I basically scaled it by 200 on the x and y axis.
And I still believe it’s to small for what I’m trying to achieve.
You can run from one side to the other in like 5 minutes.
Also, the size is needed for the number of groups expanding on it.
That’s the size geocontrol2 claims it is. However I had to scale it up on the x and y axis to make sure you didnt fall of the edge after walking in any direction for 3 seconds.
So with taht being said.
I have thought about level streaming. But I have no idea hot that works in UE4, udk3 I can but UE4… bleh.
Also I am still in the process of refining the map. After which I will try to export it into blender to see if I can make an actual mesh out of it.
After that, anything is possible.
I can’t wait to try it out once they’ve fixed it though, my scene needs more grass.