How to realize interactive snow in UE5

[Melvixz]

@Chosker

you’d still have the Landscape for the collision

That is true.

@Chosker

Add enough render subdivisions to the VHM so the snow isn’t low poly. this could kill the VHM performance though

It would. Hopefully, it will be very much improved when the full release is made next year. But the devs didn’t seem to show much interest in VHM the last time they did a livestream about Nanite some months back.

@hedgie17

Maybe for example you could make it on a grand scale but there’s so much “fog” from the snow storm that it makes the tessellation invisible after so much distance and the player wouldn’t know better that it was removed

You have a point about the areas not being that vast or large. That would be a smart way to improve performance.

@Frenetic_Pony

It’s also possible to apply this to arbitrary meshes. It’s just a software version of tessellation that’s crack free and has a fairly smooth and continuous transition. Long term, if Epic dedicates the resources to it, it could be a full replacement for tessellation, including programmable materials and displacement maps and etc. It can even do catmull-clark subdivision, though Epic has stated they don’t want to work with non standard modelling tools like that.

+1 for VHM to be able to be used with static meshes but I think they may even get rid of VHM and landscape all together since Nanite would be able to handle all other aspects like foilage, spline meshes, animated or deformable meshes in future. Not sure about hair in Ue5 and Nanite.

Maybe we might be getting distance based displacement with Nanite for very large static meshes? Because from what you have mentioned, I am thinking why use Nanite when you can use VHM and it’s tessellation is distance based if it worked with static meshes?