Landscape Mountains Project

[TimeSpirits]

I just loaded up and played around with the Landscape Mountains project you guys released with 4.4.

I want to preface this that I love all the examples you guys have been releasing, some of this feedback might come off as harsh on this particular project.

1. I have no idea why you guys made a hang glider demo when it’s pretty clear the majority of forum users are making games where you run on the ground. From my standpoint, construction of terrain an assets for a flight simulator is drastically different than from a game that takes place on foot. It’s evidenced in this demo too, the terrain looks great from a distance but might as well be a skybox. The on the ground detail is very low, even the normal maps look odd close up. This demo kind of suffers from the same thing the vehicle one did- by restricting how you experience the project you are limiting the number of methods you are showing off. Maybe that’s on purpose?

2. Doesn’t show off foliage well. No grass and a little over 2000 trees in the scene? Again, I think a lot of people are trying to create areas with heavy amounts of foliage, grass, trees and run at a respectable rate. This doesn’t show off any of that. I was expecting you guys to have a bang up example of grass, a cool looking forest- maybe some water elements. Something like this:

://youtu.be/1uQtCOWNn5M

3. Material complexity. Almost the entire scene is red when viewing material complexity. The material setup itself is so bizzarre and it doesn’t seem to be using the Landscape Layer Blend node or texture height maps. Which I found odd seeing as those features were made specifically to create landscapes.

I know there is some duality here, on one hand I’m asking for new tricks and on the other I don’t know why you aren’t demoing existing methods. I was surprised this was the area you decided to create complexity with instead of showing us a fast running 10,000 tree forest with fields of grass. Foliage wasn’t push at all in my opinion. And by choosing a mostly barren landscape, you avoided that issue all together.

Anyone else feel this way? Or were my expectations off?

[anonymous_user_923c79df]

2. those trees are a pretty good example of foliage for big maps -> good LOD’s

But yeah, hopefully there will be more vegetation in the “large” landscape map which they will release later

[Jacky]

I’m glad it was a glider instead of an fps project or just a matinee sequence really. There are tons of materials out there for walking characters. Also they said they are preparing a larger landscape project(probably an example for World Composition.)

[Joviex]

@;119161

Anyone else feel this way? Or were my expectations off?

No, I get what you are saying, but its a base. Why not take 10x the number of tree instances and populate the base scene and throw up a youtube video?

I am not trying to be a pedantic ***, but they do provide nothing but great material and examples, rather quickly.

I don’t think we should be a sad panda when its not the “perfect for my use case” demo, or might require some work on our part to really make a good tech demo of the engine per se.

[n00854180t]

I have no idea why you guys made a hang glider demo when it’s pretty clear the majority of forum users are making games where you run on the ground.

Probably because it’s pretty easy to right click one of the other example Character (third/first person) blueprints, click Migrate, select the Landscape Demo’s Content folder, open the project up, click World Settings and select the non-glider Character blueprint.

Personally I think it’s that they gave us another, completely unique, Character setup to use, rather than just including one of the ones that we can move into that project ourselves with ease.

[anonymous_user_138c2332]

@;119161

I just loaded up and played around with the Landscape Mountains project you guys released with 4.4.

I want to preface this that I love all the examples you guys have been releasing, some of this feedback might come off as harsh on this particular project.

1. I have no idea why you guys made a hang glider demo when it’s pretty clear the majority of forum users are making games where you run on the ground. From my standpoint, construction of terrain an assets for a flight simulator is drastically different than from a game that takes place on foot. It’s evidenced in this demo too, the terrain looks great from a distance but might as well be a skybox. The on the ground detail is very low, even the normal maps look odd close up. This demo kind of suffers from the same thing the vehicle one did- by restricting how you experience the project you are limiting the number of methods you are showing off. Maybe that’s on purpose?

2. Doesn’t show off foliage well. No grass and a little over 2000 trees in the scene? Again, I think a lot of people are trying to create areas with heavy amounts of foliage, grass, trees and run at a respectable rate. This doesn’t show off any of that. I was expecting you guys to have a bang up example of grass, a cool looking forest- maybe some water elements. Something like this:

://youtu.be/1uQtCOWNn5M

3. Material complexity. Almost the entire scene is red when viewing material complexity. The material setup itself is so bizzarre and it doesn’t seem to be using the Landscape Layer Blend node or texture height maps. Which I found odd seeing as those features were made specifically to create landscapes.

I know there is some duality here, on one hand I’m asking for new tricks and on the other I don’t know why you aren’t demoing existing methods. I was surprised this was the area you decided to create complexity with instead of showing us a fast running 10,000 tree forest with fields of grass. Foliage wasn’t push at all in my opinion. And by choosing a mostly barren landscape, you avoided that issue all together.

Anyone else feel this way? Or were my expectations off?

You are right, still struggling to reach year 2007 next-gen. (or prev-gen?)

[SememeS]

@;119166

I’m glad it was a glider instead of an fps project or just a matinee sequence really. There are tons of materials out there for walking characters.

My feelings exactly.

I had so much fun with hand gliding! That song they have in there while gliding is just perfect.

[FrankieV]

Well at least I harvest the birds blueprint out it that I needed for one of my maps.

[Chimp]

I agree 100% OP. It’s pretty disappointing all round. Basically a completely bald World Machine ad.

The material is interesting, if not extremely confusing, but it’s still only using 3 main textures…

[Kuro1n]

@;119279

Well at least I harvest the birds blueprint out it that I needed for one of my maps.

Hahaha first thing I did once I saw the birds as well!

[anonymous_user_a006f79c]

@Chimp;119347

I agree 100% OP. It’s pretty disappointing all round. Basically a completely bald World Machine ad.

The material is interesting, if not extremely confusing, but it’s still only using 3 main textures…

Edit to make better sense:

Yes it looks very “retro”, I found using the UDK overlay approach with a color map helps then you lay grayscale textures and normal detail under it. Simple to do and cuts material complexity, another thing to do is add plenty of decal to cover the base and add LMIV’s to try a focal points to try and draw the eye. Not on the same terms of performance or pretty when comparing to CryEngine though…

[anonymous_user_a006f79c]

@Chariots;119949

Having thick grass on that map wouldn’t really work I think. The way the foliage tool works, it is simply way too heavy work and very performance intensive. They would need some kind of procedural grass/small foliage system (https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?29922-Procedural-foliage-(grass-etc)-support-by-landscape-weight-maps). That is what Cryengine uses.

Even in Unity, whilst the base shaders need work you can easily fill out a terrain full of foliage and detail meshes with little to no impact. For grass it’s a 2D tex applied to a plane then it’s batched, even the terrain can be quickly offset by modifying the pixel error amount and detail resolution / per patch. A terrain brimmed with foliage and detail you can easily get away with 500 - 600 draw calls / 13 ms latency 60FPS + on some pretty rubbish hardware.

There’s plenty of options to reduce overhead and impact, culling and LOD system works pretty well. From others complaining of speed issues with Foliage + Speedtree, I’m beginning to think it’s nothing to do with how UE4 applies it. I’ll update the speedtree thread with the reasons…

The only issue I have and this is a prime example of what I see on terrains is the lighting, I’m actually thinking about ripping out there current LPV solution and replacing it with something completely different like I did with Unity although it was more of a hack job with Unity, nice to have the source code :)…

[anonymous_user_a006f79c]

@Chariots;120157

Unity stores its grass/detail data as an array, and generates it as you get close it, which works very well with small stuff that doesn’t require precision placement. UE4 foliage tool works by placing actors. It is a very good solution for things like trees and large rocks, but when it comes to small high frequency detail, it doesn’t scale well. Especially on large maps, it can cause streaming hitches due to the complexity of the individual clusters. It also gets harder to place them, as the editor starts hanging after placing too many of them.

I was talking about UE4 with Culling and LOD :), I understand how Unity does it and we both know it’s limitations as it was one of the reasons for both you and me went to Eval UE4. Also I agree the CE way of doing things is pretty good…

[Kuro1n]

@Chariots;120157

Unity stores its grass/detail data as an array, and generates it as you get close it, which works very well with small stuff that doesn’t require precision placement. UE4 foliage tool works by placing actors. It is a very good solution for things like trees and large rocks, but when it comes to small high frequency detail, it doesn’t scale well. Especially on large maps, it can cause streaming hitches due to the complexity of the individual clusters. It also gets harder to place them, as the editor starts hanging after placing too many of them.

This is my own experience as well. Been trying to put out a lot of grass meshes and I get quite bad performance after a while with nothing special in the scene other than grass which are planes, and trees which are rather low poly with LODs.

[JosephJames]

@;119161

3) Material complexity. Almost the entire scene is red when viewing material complexity. The material setup itself is so bizzarre and it doesn’t seem to be using the Landscape Layer Blend node or texture height maps. Which I found odd seeing as those features were made specifically to create landscapes.

I know there is some duality here, on one hand I’m asking for new tricks and on the other I don’t know why you aren’t demoing existing methods. I was surprised this was the area you decided to create complexity with instead of showing us a fast running 10,000 tree forest with fields of grass. Foliage wasn’t push at all in my opinion. And by choosing a mostly barren landscape, you avoided that issue all together.

Anyone else feel this way? Or were my expectations off?

This really needs to be addressed, as well as the landscape blending in general. So far I’ve seen almost no outdoor landscapes that look halfway decent and I’m pretty sure it’s due to how complicated landscape layering is.

[cadviz]

Birds Blueprint problem with UE 4.8.3

Previously I had downloaded the (Landscape Mountains Project) which was compatible with UE 4.4.3…
Now; I switch to run it with UE 4.8.3 … I discovered the birds blueprint is not running properly as it was running before… and I have no idea how to fix…
Need an advice…
Edit
Same issue with UE 4.5.0

[cadviz]

@cadviz;366127

Previously I had downloaded the (Landscape Mountains Project) which was compatible with UE 4.4.3…
Now; I switch to run it with UE 4.8.3 … I discovered the birds blueprint is not running properly as it was running before… and I have no idea how to fix…
Need an advice…
Edit
Same issue with UE 4.5.0

The solution I tried (successfully) is to

1. Re-download the (LandscapeMountains_4.8) from Launcher
2. Build project from it…
3. Run the project with UE 4.8.3
4. Migrate the birds blueprint to my project.
5. Run My project
6. Drag & Drop the birds blueprint in my level…>>> worked Perfectly