Hi everyone, I am a 3D artist and I wanted to make a VR UE5 project for the sake of learning and improving my skills. I want to present what I have so far and hear your advice and feedback. This is still a WIP but I am running out of ideas. I definitely want to push the graphic quality further, if possible.
I want to briefly describe what I have done so far. I apologise if this is not the right section of the forum for this thread.
I started with the VR template. I created a landscape in World Machine, I got the heightmap and other masks that I used to blend different materials. I added the main structures of the house that I modelled in Blender. Almost all textures come from megascans, also some assets like the bed and the couches. I kept most of the surface textures, for floors or walls, limited to 1024x1024 pixels. Some individual assets might have textures at 2K.
Lighting:
All the lights are baked except for one directional light that is set to movable. There are two directional lights in the exact same position and orientation, one fully baked and the other fully movable. I noticed a big difference when adding the movable one, especially on the landscape. I am using the GPU lightmass plugin to bake lights and the results are noticeably better.
Effects:
There are 2 small fountains, water and a fireplace in the scene, as well as some fake fog planes outdoors. The water and the fog are just materials using a scrollable texture. The fountains are the same, but they add refraction and displacement of the mesh based on the texture. The fireplace is the same idea, but instead of a scrolling texture it uses a flipbook texture, generated from a fire simulation in Embergen.
Functionality:
The functionality is just what comes with the VR template. There is basic teleportation movement and some grabbable objects in the scene
Landscape Blending:
I wanted to achieve a nice looking exterior view. I am happy with the base landscape, but I wanted to add megascans to add details. To blend them with the terrain I used Runtime Virtual Textures. However, this does not look good in this case. The landscape is too large and the RVT does not have enough detail and the asset does not blend well with the terrain:
I would be fine with not having detail in the base color of the texture, but being able to see where the two meshes intersect is what truly bothers me. I would love to hear advice on this
Other Problems:
Beyond the issue of the RVTs I have noticed annoying black artifacts that “flicker” on my foliage meshes. I have no idea why this is happening. I tried to add some small rocks to the foliage system to scatter them more easily and they also get the artifacts. However, if instead of adding them as foliage I just manually place them as static meshes there are no artifacts.
Screen Space Reflections do not seem to work, I added the postprocessing volume and checked the intensity for it but it does not show.
Trying to visualize shader complexity in the optimization viewmodes crashes unreal
Wishes:
I would like to use decals to add some extra details, especially on glass surfaces. I don’t know how this would affect performance. I also would like to learn how to assess performance better. I tried to find information but I have not been very lucky. I would love to find a tutorial or article that explains the tools and how to use them.
And finally, if the performance allows it. I would like to detail the landscape more (more foliage, megascans…)
Conclusion for now:
The scene works in VR on my gaming laptop. I tested on the editor and also made a couple of builds. My specs:
AMD Ryzen 7 5800H
32GB RAM
RTX 3070 Laptop
Oculus Rift S
Thank you for taking the time to read my post. I know it is a lengthy one but I want to learn as much as possible