I’m working on a fall rice paddy scene in Unreal Engine. I planted individual rice stalks using a POG method and then merged them all into a single static mesh for performance reasons. However, when I view the scene from high up (like a bird’s eye view), the paddy looks awkward—it appears to sparkle or flicker and doesn’t deliver the expected graphical quality.
Has anyone experienced a similar issue or have suggestions on how to improve the far-distance appearance of a merged static mesh? I’ve tried tweaking LOD settings and material adjustments, but nothing seems to fully fix the problem.
Try changing the settings of the rice fields texture to generate mip maps. They are lower resolution version of the texture that are swapped out at a distance. This can help with pixel shimmering at distance.
I set all the textures used for the rice to have their MIP GEN SETTINGS set to “FromTextureGroup”, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. Up close, the rice field looks fine, but from a distance, it appears as if it’s made up of little dots (as shown above), which looks awkward. Can anyone help?
At that distance you could just have polygons that match the approximate shape and have a texture the color of wheat and brown lines going through it the color of dirt.
Everything that gets reduced by the engine ‘suffers’ due to the pixel squishing that mips cause onto the transparency masks.
In this case, disabling mips isnt an option. You are far to far from the scene to even be rendering the plants.
If you need aerial view, simply disable the instances and replace the color of the field via material.
Alternatively, from upright views within the field, just disable the opacity masks after 200m or so from view - you can do this via LOD by creating a different LOD mesh with a different material like you normally do for foliage.
That alone will remove the seemingly white zones.
The other thing is that your asset is wrong.
The image for the grain should not have a white background.
If it didn’t, then there wouldnt be any white areas showing up anywhere.
