Hello,
I am experimenting with the Megatree system on the default open world map. I created a grid of PCG volumes that generate trees on the landscape (as you can see in the screenshot above). The trees are Instanced skeletal meshes and use the global foliage actor to animate. They are set up to use nanite voxelization.
The reason I made a grid of PCG volumes is because I wanted to see if integrating the world partition system would improve performance. So theoretically, the trees in the distance would become HLODs. This does not seem to be the case, however. After setting the HLOD layer on the PCG volumes and building the HLODs, when I switch on “show HLOD colorization” I can see the blue landscape in the distance, but the trees remain their normal color. What is interesting is that if I unload the entire map, I can select the HLODs for the different forest chunks, meaning they are being generated. Furthermore, with the map unloaded, if I fly up to the trees, they start animating as if they are loaded. This makes me think that the nanite voxelization method is overriding the HLOD system. I did not see any performance gains from adding the HLODs for the trees, either.
So, am I correct that HLODs do not work with ISKMs using nanite voxelization, or am I doing something incorrectly?
My goal is to determine whether these new megatrees will actually be performant on a large scale map. So far the answer is: it depends on the number of instances. The number I have in the picture above ( about 125,000) would not be viable for most hardware. (I’m running on a 5080).