Good morning,
I use the Unreal Engine destruction system. But I have problems with rendering Geometry Collections.
Currently it is not possible to generate Distance-Fields for Geometry Collections so rendering with Lumen is bad.
There is also a problem with Path Tracing. All Geometry Collections in my scene become invisible in Path Tracing rendering.
I can’t find any information about its limitations in the Unreal Engine docs.
About the Distance-Fields since each small element of the hierarchy are static I imagine it should be possible to manage them as Static Meshes?
I imagine for game performance it’s not great but it would be nice to have an option for animations or cinematics.
Small note: I notice that for Skeletal Meshes the problem of Distance-Fields can be corrected by using Hardware Ray Tracing. This does not work with Geometry Collections.
Also the Geometry Collections have no shadows at all if Ray Traced Shadows is active.
I think it’s related to the Path Tracing issue.
What do you think and do you have any techniques to work around this problem?
This may be because geometry collections are hidden from hardware raytracing by default. You can try enabling it with this cvar: r.RayTracing.Geometry.GeometryCollection 1
Just keep in mind, they’re hidden from the raytracing view by default because the raytracing accelleration structure needs to be rebuilt every frame for them which is extremely expensive. Probably fine for cinematics though.
Regarding mesh distance fields, I asked about this in early access and this is the response i got:
