Hello!
Long story short, I’m working on a project that has a scene where the player will at some point fly through a layer of clouds. Currently I’m substituting for a technical artist, so it’s fallen on my shoulders to implement them (I’m a software engineer, so this is not something I usually do). I’ve been reading up on particle effects in UE4, and one thing I keep noticing is all the talk about performance considerations with sprite-based particle emitters with translucent materials.
Considering the fact that on a Rift device the scene will basically be rendered twice, I have some serious concerns regarding the possible performance hit. There’s a lot of work to be done if I want to stay above 75 FPS while going through a huge cloud of particles.
So, my question to you, guys: I took the P_cloud actor from official Content Examples and played around with it. Having a bunch of them in the scene without Rift costs me at least 25 FPS on a low-end system (Core i5, GeForce 230 GT - this is one of the requirements for the project, to run on low-end systems at 75 FPS and above). Switching to GPU Sprites and reducing the global spawn rate scale made things a bit better, now I get frames at under 33 ms. But still, inside the Rift it will probably take a huge FPS hit regardless. What would be the best way to go about creating volumetric (I guess that’s the proper term) clouds for the Rift?