Low FPS after placement of low tris tres

Hello forum!

I’ve been working with Blender for quite a while on-off, and Unreal Engine 4 for the last two weeks.
I think I’m starting to get the hang of UE4, but there’s still one problem that bothers me.

I’ve learned that low tris grass (6-8-16 tris) and low tris trees (60-80) are great for performance.
The grass doesn’t seem to hit my FPS that much (haven’t tested with huge grass areas with a density of 8000), but the trees seems to be a great impact on my FPS.

To be clear, we’re talking about 72 tris trees made with blender (refer to image below)

I’ve placed 10 trees into my scene (refer to image below)

As you can spot in the top right corner of the image above, I only seem to achieve an FPS of 23-30 (even lower when running the game).

I’m not quite sure why this is happening.
If any of you need my specs, here they are:

  • Processor: Intel Core I7-3630QM 2.40GHz
  • 16GB DDR3 RAM
  • Nvidia GeForce GTX 670MX (Laptop)
  • Windows 10 64-bit

If you need more specs, tell me and I’ll edit the list.

Can anyone tell me why this has such a huge impact on my FPS?

-could you show a wireframe view of your mesh? -> make sure to keep the transparent areas as low as possible :slight_smile:
-especially in laptops it could be that you use the wrong gpu (e.g in my laptop I have an integrated gpu and a gaming gpu) -> make sure that you use the good one
-show a pic of the material

Wireframe from Blender:

Material (Not the movement of the texture (Simple Grass Wind))

I’m pretty sure I’m using the correct GPU as I set the global setting to use the Nvidia one (will check though -> Laptops FTW)

Okay, I was running on the integrated GPU -> Trying with my Nvidia

Yep, that will surely boost your fps count :slight_smile:

  • also make sure to run your pc on the “high performance” power settings

Beside that everything looks correct -> you could improve the tree planes a little bit (e.g at the top you have large transparent areas -> better add some more vertices) + do you use the foliage shading blend mode?

I’m not sure what you mean? Could you explain?

Other than that, could you please provide a picture of a wireframe and a solid picture a tree from your “Free Foliage Starter Kit”?
Bare in mind, first time making trees :slight_smile: and my first tree (made in Blender with the sapling addon) was 50k tris :slight_smile:

There is a special way to create a foliage material -> dont know if it will improve the performance, but it looks better :stuck_out_tongue:

The trees from the starter kit are not so good -> better take a look at some of the trees from speedtree -> you can download one for free

Just be clear, It’s not foliage. I’m dragging and dropping the meshes into the scene, since I think I read somewhere, that you can’t make foliage “sway” in the wind. Maybe that’s just me

foliage = trees, grass, flowers,… :wink:
So even when you drag and drop them into the scene you can still use a foliage material.
But even when you place them with the foliage tool you can let them swing -> take a look at my foliage pack