I have a small problem, which is I think unique to meshes imported through Datasmith, maybe even specifically from Rhino, but i really don’t know. usually I can find all the answers I need by browsing, alas not this time.
I am using tessellation/displacement with assets I have imported from Rhino 6 with data-smith, and these materials don’t work unless I “build the adjacency buffer” for each individual static mesh.
I used replace references after import to replace the data-smith made materials from the Rhino import with pre-made height blend material instances.
The materials don’t show up on any of the assets (world grid material) until I open each static mesh, check the build adjacency buffer box and hit apply.
The problem is there are over 400 static meshes that make up the data-smith scene and I would have to open them each up one at a time, reassign the material and build the adjacency buffer just to get the materials to show up and it kind of destroys what has become a quite effective pipeline.
I am hoping there is a way that I can do this for all static meshes at once, but I cant find this setting in the property matrix, and it doesn’t appear to be in any of the data-smith options for import either. I am using all the latest versions of Unreal and plugins.
Alternatively, I could use FBX for all assets that need tessellation and displacement if this is just a data-smith issue.
unfortunately no, the workaround I have been using is to export any objects that need displacement as FBX and leave them out of the Data smith pipeline. For this I usually go from Rhino to Blender to merge the vertices and tweak the mesh density if need be than into Ue4, but its a bit of a pain getting all the settings right so the scale and orientation doesn’t change.
Mostly I just don’t use displacement that much unless I need it, especially because it only half works with ray tracing (Displacement Can only be positive as displaced surface is still visible underneath) and this means any foliage etc will get hidden as it doesn’t recognise the displacement and will get covered depending on how much displacement is used.
Instead of using displacement for groundscape stuff I have been using blender and just sculpting modular bits and using virtual texturing to blend them to base landscape un UE4.
This is kind of a disturbing problem because the adjacency buffer - and other build settings - of static mesh components cannot be bulk edited via the property matrix. It is, of course, extremely tedious to have to flag this one setting for dozens of hundreds of assets on import using the Datasmith pipeline. Is there no other way?