Im sure that this is already being worked on and i am equally sure that many people have suggested similar however please Epic, please make some sort of a grass system. Perhaps even make it seperate to the foliage system if you have to and if that makes things any easier. In UDK I was able to use massive amounts of placed weeds, grass and trees without a problem however now as anyone who has tried to make an outdoor area will probably attest, it is a nightmare making anything that is more than a barren scrubland.
My current project relies on lush gardens, verdant greenery everywhere and a general feeling of living country - and sadly at the moment it is so difficult. Using the speedtree pipeline I can create trees, bushes and grass without a problem - and placing the trees and bushes is of course a snap. The grass though looks like the chin of a 17 year old teenager trying to impress the girls with his Shaggyesque beard, plus it takes about a billion hours to bake (when it does work… Im looking at you latest 4.7 release…).
Could perhaps a particle system not work using instanced meshes that could place grass at rendertime even? Just as long as we have grass! (Now I sound like a medical cannabis advocate!)
Nice time for this request
There is new special lighting model for grass in 4.7 which looks pretty neat!
And Epics are developing new advanced tool to replace foliage - ~Biome tool
As always, I want to clarify so that there is no confusion. This is not being directly integrated into the out-of-the-box (UE4 Binary or GitHub Master Branch) of the engine. This may be considered in the future, but it’s not happening right now.
This is something that Mike and his team are doing with their own NVIDIA branches for the community.
With that being said, I’m definitely looking forward to these branches to have to fun too!
Wow, i never get this right, last post i read i got the impresion that some but not all GameWorks Fetures be supported out of the box.
Now you are saying that NO NVIDIA GameWorks stuff will be supported (out of the box) in UE 4 ?
What about the GameWorks page? ](NVIDIA FleX | NVIDIA Developer) It clearly states that its upcoming for UE 4 (you expect out of the box support when reading that.)
Am very curius on what type of GI is going to come for Large Open Worlds. And what Epic is considering, the Trello page dont seem to get that much love these days.
I think this hole process with seperate GitHub repo`s and unconfirmed fetures.
And everything in betwen to be verfy confusing and frustrating.
And to be honest i want out of the box solutions.
I hope this is not going to be somethign Epic leans on and say you can get it on git hub.
And not providing out of the box support for stuff like decent water/ oceans, Global Ilumination, and so on and so 4th.
Am very thankfull for the work that is beeing put into it.
But i think stuff like this needs more attention from you guys at Epic.
I think this post has gotten a little off-track from it’s original topic, but I’ll answer this real quick and then we can go back to awesome grass-system talk!
I think Mike has been very clear in the NVIDIA thread that these were GitHub integration’s and are actively being developed. I think excitement often overshadows some of the reality of how this will work with the Master Branch on GitHub and the Binary versions for an “out-of-the-box” type integration.
As Mike notes he keeping things as up to date as possible in the GitHub Unreal Engine\NVPhysX branch.
This is NVIDIA’s page for their integration of their code for UE4 and not what will be included with UE4’s Binary or GitHub branch of the editor. As previously stated in other posts, the framework is there for the integration of NV GameWorks, but the tech is not.
This is not to say that there cannot be solutions that work in the future to have this tech integrated in the out-of-the-box version of the engine, but the key is that the tech cannot be GPU dependent. It will have to be a CPU based version of the tech that can run on all systems that UE4 can as to not segregate part of the community from being able to develop. It also wouldn’t look good to support one type of GPU and ignore another making the engine seemed biased towards one or another type of GPU.
Epic is committed to improving large Open-World support and the developers have said this numerous times on our Twitch streams and forums. There are improvements being made to help facilitate some awesomeness and as SitRec pointed out there are some cool tools being developed for the EcoSystem he mentions.
GI is always a touchy subject I think. Some will argue LPV is where it’s at (which is not a production-ready feature and I don’t recommend it until it is further developed) and I am excited about Daniel’s latest work with Distance Fields GI (Global Illumination alternatives - Feedback & Requests - Epic Developer Community Forums) but that is still being developed to a more ready state.
The separate GitHub repo’s are a normal thing. This is not something that Epic has officially setup. I do understand the confusion, but this is something that Mike and his team at NVIDIA has decided to offer to the community and has mentioned that it’s a Work-in-progress and GitHub only. Some of the integration’s they’ve made in their branch require cards with CUDA (ie. WaveWorks integration) while others will be CPU based and able to be used by all or most everyone without NV cards.
Again, this is not to say that this will not be included in a future release of the engine, but that if it’s going to be supported for the out-of-the-box version it needs to be CPU based to work with anyone who is using UE4. Myself and a whole lot of the community are with you on this. I would love to see this tech integrated for everyone to use, but it really needs to be a solution that works for everyone and something that has been fully tested.
I think James sums it up pretty well with this, “We have a great relationship with NVIDIA going back many years, and we are talking to them about a way to bring that tech to UE4 in a cross-platform way. We have no plans to implement them until we come up with a solution to that problem though.”
I think Mike and his team are doing an awesome job at getting CPU focused version of their tech and would love to see it in a future release myself. It’s just not going to be at the moment.
Thank you Tim!
Now i finaly can put my shoulders down a bit i feel i finaly got a straight answer.
And to get back on topic Turf Effects simply look insane!
So if all the GameWorks features will work on DX Compute, so both Nvidia and AMD, they would still not be allowed to get integrated into epic branch of the engine? As far as I know there are already things which are exclusive to DirectX 11 in the engine, so why would this be a problem?
John, I never said this isn’t a possibility of it being integrated. It’s just not something that will not happen in the near future that I’m aware of. Things can always change as priorities change, but at the moment NVIDIA’s tech will be their own separate branch that Mike has setup. As Mike has said this is still being actively developed by their team.
I would love to see the day this tech is integrated in a DXC version and aslo, as I said, if it can run on both AMD and NV cards it’s more likely to be considered. The goal is for everyone to be able to use UE4 and not segregate the community between AMD and NV GPUs.
I know, I just wondered because you said (3 times!) only a CPU based version would be considered to get integrated into the main branch. So a DXC version will not, because DXC is not CPU based. I just wanted to know why CPU based would be allowed, but DXC not. Now you say DXC would also be ok?
The most important part is GPU agnosticism. It needs to run on both AMD and NV tech to be something that will be considered from my talks with engineers.
A good year for people working on outdoor scenes
From joke to serious, yes more foliage would be great 
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