This is one of the issues I ran into when moving from UE4 to UE5. Where meshes were being stretched to some origin point. I determined that it was a node in materials called SpeedTree, which was used to improve the quality of distant trees; trees that turn into billboards when far enough.
It seems like something that could be mimicked easy enough by someone that knows materials better? I haven’t tried yet. By somehow adjusting World Position Offset to better align billboard angles to the viewer. That seems to be what it’s used for here.
I think I’m running into the same issue with PLE. It seems to also be using SpeedTree. Thank you for this! Disabling it seems to work, though I do wonder what I’m losing. The trees appear to get a little brighter. Since it’s going into WPO, perhaps it’s trying to do wind? I see that’s an input.
You lose some realism on distant trees. Trees in the distance are just planes stuck together, and the SpeedTree node aligns them toward the viewer in a way that you’re less able to see that. I don’t think it affects anything else in this case. So it’s not too big of a deal if you couldn’t see it
Running into same issue after 5.0.0 release. Found that on the node you can set Wind Type to something other than None will remove the stretching while still allowing the billboarding to work correctly. Not exactly sure what this setting does though.
