Hello all. I’ve been trying to tessellate my landscape based on the camera position and I’ve successfully done so - the landscape now displaces when the camera is close and decreases the LOD when it goes away, improving framerate. The problem? I copied the material nodes from another thread on the subject and I have literally no idea what I just did or how I can adjust it. Here is the material in the editor:
There are two major questions I’d like to ask. Firstly - can you please just give me a step-by-step guide on exactly what is happening in this graph? I literally don’t even know where to begin when figuring it out, but it works fine for the kind of tessellation I want. Secondly, I’d like to make a few changes to the graph, and I don’t know how to do it. Can you help me? Here are the changes:
-I’d like to make it so that the ground displaces around a single, immobile world position rather than where the camera is.
-I’d like to increase the tessellation multiplier to add more triangles to the mesh. With so many nodes in front of the tessellation multiplier, I don’t know where to begin with this.
Thanks in advance for any answers. Here is the thread I copied the graph from:
I’ll start with what you already have, but only the bits that are important:
to answer your first question, we have a look at the start of the network:
as you can see, to define a set world position from which the tesselation will occur, we simply swap out the ‘camera position’ node with a 3-vector node containing the x,y,z values of the position we want the effect to displace around (the x,y,z position will go in to the r,g,b coordinates in the 3-vector node)
as for adding more vertices, we look at the end of the network where the output goes, and add/multiply by >1 to get more vertices:
Hello Construc_, and thank you for the reply. First off all, your post made it a lot easier to understand the way the graph was working and I have to thank you for that. Secondly, your suggestions partially worked - setting a Constant Three node in place of the Camera Position node does indeed change the tessellation location to a particular point in worldspace. Oddly though, the terrain still tessellates dynamically the further you move away from it; I thought that it would now the effect would be static. Lastly, the multiply/add effect does not work. The tessellation density remains the same - however using the add function increases the range of the tessellation from the Constant Three node, resulting in a sharp drop in frames.
Could you provide any further assistance, and perhaps explain more of the graph? Again, thanks for your help so far.
ah, ok… i think that’s as dense as the tesselation will get then, sorry.
as for the landscape still tessellating dynamically, landscapes do their own tessellation for optimization and its best to leave this alone if you can help it, but you can click on the landscape actor and reduce it’s LOD distance factor.
Hi Construc. Changed the LOD distance factor, this did nothing. Looks like I may have to resort to using a geometric plane and try to fade it into the terrain somehow
Really wish I could have solved this.
EDIT - Well, I have something interesting to report - to get the polygon density to the level I wanted, all I had to do was reduce the scale of the terrain. Now, instead of 100, it is set to 1 and it is displacing accurately. I suppose by making an enormous piece of terrain and then reducing the scale, I could get the density I want. Will report back.
Ok, back again. Unfortunately, to get the density I want, I have to reduce the terrain size to the point of impracticality. So, unless I can find a way to increase the resolution of the tessellation in the graph, this project is finished.
