What is VT?
Virtual Texture
Okay, I figured but wanted to be sure. I’ll give that a shot and hopefully it’ll work.
There working but you need to ■■■■ around with settings, I have WP and HLODs working on 5.2 on my live game on steam.
I have gotten it to work in some simple and limited test scenarios but kept running into weird issues, sometimes re-doing the setup with the same settings would yield different results so for all I care it’s still not properly working.
Besides, how would you bake down HLODs for say a Nanite forest with tens of millions of instances with up to 2mil tris each? Legitimate question as I don’t see how this can work without blowing up the engine.
Probably wouldn’t.
I assume you’d either use impostors or just let Nanite deal with it.
I wish Epic would give is more insight into how they deal with these things in Fortnite.
Using impostors defeats the purpose of Nanite and letting Nanite just deal with it causes massive performance issues, so something has to be done with either HLODs or Nanite to solve this.
With Fortnite they just fully modeled their trees including leaves to not need masked materials which is the biggest issue currently with Nanite foliage, besides that Fortnite is not a very complex example for devs to reference, especially when the tech is so in flux and rapidly changing, just gotta wait it out 
I suppose that really depends on what you think Nanite’s purpose is… I’d argue using Nanite for foliage at all, already fails most of the stated goals of Nanite. We just don’t really have a choice because it’s the only way to get foliage instances captured by Lumen, and the only way to make VSM reasonably performant.
If using impostors for the HLOD layers achieves the desired result then that’s what should be done, whether it “defeats the purpose” or not.
They don’t have “thosands” of trees. Usually you can count the total instances while playing a match…
If thy has more instances, surely the system would be better designed…
t completed (i.e. missing call to PreEditChange) before modifying a texture property
For those interested, I had the same issue that didn’t allow me to build HLODs with VT enabled, I solved it by enabling Nanite landscape and keeping VT on, and flatten_material_VT as material inside the HLOD layer
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You would want to split the trees into there own HLODs layers and bake them not all at once or you will run out of system memory lol.
How would you selectively bake these layers and what would the workflow look like? In our case we have trees up to 2mil triangles each in a 8K map, that’s millions of instances and literally trillions of triangles that would be baked down. Would likely need some other solution to deal with these kind of situations which aren’t unrealistic if you’re making a complex open world with Nanite.
We can definitely agree that any solution is better than none
But it would still be ideal to deal with this in a way that doesn’t interfer with the purpose of Nanite since as you stated we’re kinda stuck with it.
No one should be doing this. The system is basically pre-alpha. Whatever you do is most likely just a waste of time at this point.
Its not much of a workflow.
You have to convert foliage to instances, possibly deal with less than 1fps until you merge the actors.
Ideally, you’d do it in smaller sections at a time so as not to hit below 12fps or so.
With the merged actors, I’d probably octhedral impostor them, replace them out because you really don’t need any geometry on them at a distance, and that’s that.
For 8km tiles i usually split foliage in blocks of 1km^2 to 4km^2 depending on the number of instances more-so than on how many drawcalls it sucks up.
Simply because if you go below a comfortable in-engine working treshold you probably have to close and re-open the editor loosing your selection/unsaved work…
Octhedral impostors work well, but you have to heavily modify the original script to get it running ok in .47 and I assume on 5 as well.
The alternative would be to export it out to blender as merged and use blender to simplify the geometry.
You won’t get near as close to the performance of the impostors when doing this, but there are select cases where the end result is better (lighting wise it almost always is?).
No one should be doing this means what exactly? If nobody tries we won’t know the problems, it just sucks hard in the beginning exactly because of these teething pains 
Crossing my fingers for 5.4.
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It means ecactly what I wrote.
If you want to waste your time, have at it.
People who work for a living should know better than to attempt to use a pre-alpha system for said work.
World Partition, HLODs for it, and OFPA are not pre-alpha as far as I know.
Epic is telling developers to move over to those systems. But they are all half-■■■■■ and broken.
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Im not going to defend epic if that’s what you are thinking…
The whole engine has become an unusable mess. They have no excuses…
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Nanite is the worst addition to the engine in years, even if used moderatly it doubles your frametimes -and even on a large scale its still worse than conventional lods and billboards/imposters.
The only use case for it is if you have a scene with 50.000 of the same mesh and if you target 60fps on 4080.
Currently I’m facing the same problem, some Tiles are not visible after generating the HLOD.
Is there something that might cuase this?