I’m new to Unreal Engine, so I might be missing something obvious.
I’m making a game with procedural terrain generation (not PCG) and I need my trees to be static meshes. I found these quixel megaplant spruce trees that look perfect for my game, but they seem to be skeletal meshes instead of static meshes.
I tried using the “create static mesh” button, but it only creates a few triangles visually, and the asset says it has around 82 million nanite vertices. I also tried exporting as FBX, but that gave me the same result.
Is there a proper way to export these trees as usable static meshes, or at least get them into a format Blender can support so I can decimate them there?
Do they really need to be static meshes? Nanite foliage leverages skeletal mesh system to animate wind instead of relying on wonky world position offsets. If your project uses nanite, it would probably be best to just use the megaplants as-is. While skeles have a cost, so does WPO wind. If they must be static meshes for some reason, you probably have to go into the nanite foliage assembly and bake out each section to static, then make a new foliage assembly from the pieces.
Yeah, they probably need to be static meshes for my current setup. The forest is procedurally generated, and the trees are gameplay objects that players can interact with in several ways.
I know skeletal/Nanite foliage might work visually, but I’m trying to avoid managing a lot of large skeletal tree actors if static mesh instances work better with this system.
When you say to bake out each section to static meshes, could you explain what that workflow would look like? Specifically, how would I access the Nanite foliage assembly, convert the sections, and reassemble them as usable static meshes?
I don’t really know the workflow for editing nanite assemblies. I would think you could use the PVE editor to isolate parts of the tree, and save one at a time, then convert the results to static meshes. Then make a new assembly from them. May need the Nanite Assembly Editor Utilities plugin enabled if you don’t already
Might be able to convert a whole assembly in level viewport if you place a single tree, select the instanced foliage actor, then use merge actors and convert the merged object to a static mesh.
Ended up doing several optimizations to the skeletal meshes to make them behave similar to static meshes. Ended up getting around the same performance as my old static mesh trees.
Those Megaplant trees are typically skeletal meshes because they’re designed for wind animation. If you only need static trees, check whether the asset pack includes a static mesh version first. If not, the Create Static Mesh option isn’t always reliable with Nanite assets. You may have better luck using Unreal’s Modeling Tools to bake the mesh or simply choosing a similar static Megascans tree for procedural generation—it’ll usually be much easier to work with.