Hello!
I wanted to follow up this feature request from a few years ago: [FEATURE REQUEST] Mesh Distance Fields access on ES3_1 Vulkan - General / Feedback & Requests - Epic Developer Community Forums (unrealengine.com)
There was some interesting discussion around getting MDFs working for mobile but not without some work… a lot of work by the sound of it!
MDFs would be incredibly useful on Quest/mobile, so I’d love to get this working if at all possible. Can anyone help with this?
Thank you.
apparently, it will be in a new engine release soon. 5.3-5.4, I forget which.
Amazing. Where did you hear this?
unreal road map
back here to say that they are supported on metal, but don’t yet seem to be supported on es3.1. I’m reading into it now. Half the problem is gl/vulkan rhi needing to query for bSupportDistanceFields. The other half of the problem is looking into the generation for the platform.
As far as meta quest goes, meta can report support is true from their plugin. I haven’t looked into the generation side of things in 5.3 yet. I can say that material graph still reports that distance fields don’t work on ES3.1 so there might need to be some sort of engine change to make those errors not pop up.
Following up to say that I got distance fields to show up on ES3.1 preview in the editor as well as not throw any compilation errors, but on device it is still not showing up. This is likely due to something somewhere in the compute shader (or somewhere like that) doing a different check.
When you run in Mobile HDR you’ll get distance fields no problem, but that’s just so freaking heavy for quest when you need to hit 90+ fps. (no I will not use ASW, that is lazy and incorrect)
I am pleased you say this about ASW, it’s such a hack!
Thanks for your continued efforts on this.
I was told there is a way to run mobile hdr with post processing disabled so perhaps this will be performant enough and would provide distance fields. However, the meta xr plugin disables this option as well as the gl3.2 option. Meta seems to think something still isn’t compatible so I won’t go down this route just yet.
Epic have asked what everyone would like them to add to their To Do list for the next UE5 release… You know what to do 
I did the thing
Hi @Starkium,
Have you made any further progress on this?
I’m trying to get DFAO to work on Android Vulkan too.
In an earlier post you mentioned that with Mobile HDR it does work. Is that correct? Because I’m not seeing any ambient occlusion, even with Mobile HDR on.
The path for it is available with mobile hdr yes, but I found it was bugged at the time. Not sure about in 5.5, I’m still on 5.4 because I’m using meta’s fork.
The other problem is it won’t work out of the box without you modifying scalability groups and possibly also device profile cvars. Also, you need to modify the DataDrivenPlatform.ini file in the engine config folder to enable distance fields on your platform.
With Deferred renderer only or also with Forward renderer?
also with forward
see other discussion here