Nanite offers some great options for more (static) dense ground meshes, like moss and ivy. It looks o.k. up close, but when viewed from a distance Nanite crunches the triangles into oblivion until nothing is left. Is there any way around this for meshes like this?
It’s clear that the meshes are too small screen percentage wise, but isn’t that why you’d want to use UE5 and Nanite? Right now Nanite is doing it’s job a bit too well of crunching the triangles. I understand the moss might be a bit TOO much, but even the ivy leafs have this problem, which are fairly big meshes tbh. I’ve had some challenges trying to get static foliage working with Nanite, but this one I didn’t see coming. Any suggestions how to hack my way around this problem?
Nanite doesn’t work at all with foliage. Use a regular non-nanite mesh with LODs.
Nanite relies on edge collapse decimation to reduce the triangle count, for a regular solid object this works fine because collapsing short edges as you get further from the object doesn’t impact the silhouette much so you are mainly only losing shallow detail that isn’t noticeable from a distance.
For aggregates like foliage it doesn’t work at all, because you very quickly reach a point where all of the geometry is essentially defining the silhouette and nothing can be easily collapsed without destroying the shape. This is why artist crafted foliage is never decimated, instead artists build LODs by removing whole branches and compensating for the loss in foliage density with denser card textures or distance field alpha masks.
I’m gonna just bash my head against the wall until it works. I want more dense foliage, actual moss. It has to work somehow. We can make an entire death star with greeble everywhere but moss is rocket science, I just don’t like it lol. I’ll figure something out.
I can get away with that for the ivy no problem/ My non-nanite mesh for the moss patch placement is…151k tris. Don’t really want to spam that around 1000x in the scene
Nope. One moss patch at LOD0 is 133k tris. At LOD4 they’re 8k tris. But up close there’s about 30 placements that render at LOD0. That’s around 4 mil triangles. For 3 square meters. Now let’s multiply this by 10, the total area of the floor I’d like to cover. I appreciate the help but I think LOD’s are not the solution for what I’d really like to achieve.
Some random duplication for the amount of instances I would need. Visually this looks cool for screenshots, but that FPS is hurting my soul… (at 45 down from ~80)
I tried this, during compilation it just gave me a bunch of errors and build nothing, hopefully they’ll fix something like this further down the line, sounds interesting with Nanite in mind.
Use a flat mesh w/bump offset on the material. Cheaper, and I doubt you would be up against the moss so close you would notice. As well, since it would be texture-driven you can muck with the resolution of the thing as much as you want.
hmm yes I agree that tends to look nice, this time I’d really like to be able to “paint” meshes on other geometry to really give it that silhouette that moss van give. Something not so flat with silhouette and volume.
Yes 8k. That is all, in the land where meshes can be millions of triangles 8k is nothing. I want realistic moss, not the way we’ve done things in the past. Welcome to the future.
