For years now, I have tried to make distant foliage look good with Lumen and VSM (Virtual Shadow Maps) for image rendering and cinematic animations, but I just can’t get anything close to resembling nice.
Until now, I have hacked it by using Ray Traced Shadows and very very specific sunlight angles (usually low and side/back lit) and edited hard in photoshop.
But this is not how it is supposed to be, and to take advantage of Nanite fully I need to use VSM, and I am trying my best to switch and use the tech that Epic wants me to use.
I have cranked up the all PPV (Post Process Volume) settings for Lumen and lighting to the max (and above), and added countless of console commands and experimented with hundreds of more. I hoped Unreal 5.7 and voxelied foliage would do some magic trick - but no, it didn’t help either. Enabled hardware Ray Tracing and are on Windows 11.
In general, I see other videos from explaining Unreal foliage also has pretty poor distant rendering of foliage, and even the triple-A games using Unreal have problem with smeared foliage.
BUT it looks better than what I am able to make so there must be some tricks I have not been able to figure out?
It’s kind of the the only major problem I have now, and I really hope there is anything I have missed.
(Trees are from Quixel, I have also tried the new Procedural ones that came with 5.7 plugin, it looks equally bad)