[Nanite] Support of Nanite Foliage usd file from speedtree ?

Development Rendering
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Hi Epic,

With the new Nanite foliage pipeline, there is a USD import available, where we can import an USD with the right Nanite foliage schema applied to it.

As some DCC like Houdini has a way to output such schema. I was wondering if there is any plans for Epic to have a support for Speedtree data ? A plugin to export the right USD from speedtree, or a custom Unreal import pipeline for speedtree .xml file maybe ?

Thanks

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Hello,

I believe a similar question was asked here with a lot more details provided [Content removed]

The relevant section about Speedtree is copied below but I suggest looking at the entire post:

Regarding your SpeedTree questions, we do understand that SpeedTree is a prevalent tool for foliage content generation. While we were developing Nanite Foliage for UnrealEngine 5.7, I spent some time evaluating SpeedTree’s file format to see if it would be possible to update our SpeedTree importer to support creating Nanite Assemblies. I found them to be unsuitable to represent Nanite Assemblies, because all of them had baked down the individual leaves, twigs, and branches to individual geometry.

I don’t have a whole lot of knowledge about SpeedTree, but from my searching it seems one could create a custom export pipeline to generate Nanite Assembly USDs from their Raw XML format, and it seems that instancing can be represented using Leaf References. If leaf references are able to instance more than just leaves and also represent branches or twigs, then it seems an XML to USD process could make the pipeline work. One could also author a custom importer for Unreal Engine that handles the raw XML to suit your specific purposes. This is what CD Projekt Red did for the Witcher 4 demo.

As for the future, I’m not aware of any current plans for collaboration with SpeedTree to make a Nanite Foliage workflow. Our main focus for mainstream authorship of foliage will likely remain to improve upon our PVE and PCG workflows. However, if any SpeedTree runtime format were to evolve to be represented by instanced geometry and a skeletal hierarchy, it should be easy for us to update our importer to create skeletal mesh Nanite Assemblies.

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Thanks a lot Alex, I completely missed that post sorry, a lot of information in here indeed, thanks a lot.

And this question can be closed of course…

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