In conjunction with Epic’s release of the official version of UE 4.3, has also been released! What does mean exactly? Sorry if get a bit marketing-y; I’m pulling from lots of different sources for post:
All users of UE 4.3 can now load and render models (*.SRT files) in-engine for free. In-engine rendering supports wind , dynamic LOD, branch seam blending and more. Models also work well with Lightmass.
Users may also opt for a separate subscription to the Modeler for UE4 Subscribers. It’s $19/month for anyone with access to UE 4.3.
Finally, if you have questions not addressed here, please use our forum. I’m afraid we may not be able to answer emails in a timely fashion, so the forum is your best bet. For engine integration issues, Epic’s AnswerHub is your best bet.
Technical Details
We’ve gotten lots of technical questions during the preview period. I wanted to clarify a few of them here:
The Compiler (some of you may be familiar with from the UDK) is included with the Modeler subscription. However, by default, it operates in the background. When you save a tree in the Modeler, it runs to optimize the models, generate atlases, and write the SRT files. There is no reason you can’t run it in standalone mode to optimize the atlases, billboards, etc, to your taste just like the UDK days. The general documentation is here, though several documented features don’t apply to the dedicated UE 4.3 pipeline.
To those with the preview release, we’ve fixed several bugs since then. Feel free to log in to our store and download it again.
We’ve been asked how fast is. While it uses lots of clever techniques, it’s not a magic bullet. Tree models must still be optimized, textures of a reasonable size used, reasonable instance densities painted, shader judiciously chosen, etc. Like any set of meshes in UE4, the more you add, the slower the rendering. More complex wind shaders run more slowly than simple wind shaders.
All of our models, free or for purchase, large textures. Scale down as needed. We figure it’s a lot easier to scale down than up. The Compiler is built for .
Community reaction to our lightmap-ready UV generation has been especially positive. We’ve tried to generate these UVs ourselves outside of . The results were… frustrating. In most cases it was difficult if not impossible to generate efficient UVs. Here’s an example of the type of maps the Modeler will generate very easily. You’ll also see an example UV map with every tree on the /UE4 model store. We plan to post a video soon, walking you through how to tune efficiently. In the meantime, there’s documentation on it.
There’s a lot of exciting possibilities ahead and we can’t wait to see what you do with it. Have fun guys!
Yes, we definitely want to get some more SpeedWeed on the store! There’s the one Elephant Grass set, that has a wide range of triangle counts (the product gallery shows all of them with tri counts), but that’s it so far. You can see on the VFX side of the store that we have other grasses. We just haven’t converted them over yet. We’ll get there soon though! We plan to grow the library every week.
Hi Stefan - the VFX assets will load just fine in the UE4 Modeler, but they may have intersecting triangles in the leaf meshes which wreak havoc with our lightmap UV generation. The UE4 Modeler will complain upon loading if is the case. The assets in the UE4 tree library have been carefully adjusted so won’t happen, plus we’ve gone ahead and tuned the lightmap UVs for every variation and resolution. To us, was one of the biggest features we brought to the table. Ever tried to generate efficient unique UVs for a generic 3D tree mesh? Ug. We were trying to end a nightmare a lot of people were complaining about.
Plus, the VFX assets are more expensive because they’ll often have 2-3M triangle models.
In preparation of signing up for the subscription for I however got stuck on actually getting the sample-trees into a sample project edit (removed away my embarrassing mistake caused by dragging the wrong resource into the level ).
I am definitely interested in getting a full subscription, that isn’t at all expensive.
Info about how to set wind could be found at: .unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Content//WorkingWithModelsinUE4/index.html
@Chariots - that checkbox only does something if the model itself has the spec maps applied in the material settings in the Modeler. In some cases tree zips have spec maps included, but the model itself doesn’t use them (some of our spec maps aren’t quite right for UE4’s PBR rendering).
Unless you mean there is an actual bug when a tree is using a spec map, but UE4 isn’t importing them. If that is the case, then I can log to look into it. But you can drag the spec maps in manually as a workaround for now.
We’ve had several reports about the specular map and, unfortunately, it’s a bug. Specular atlases aren’t being computed on “Save” as they should be so there’s nothing there to import. We’ve put out an update that fixes and a few other things. Subscribers can log into their account at store…com and download the new version (v7.0.7). In addition, anyone who has purchased a tree model from our store can log in and download it again to get the specular atlases.
Sorry for the inconvenience and please keep the reports coming!
Edit: Seems so, files in archive was edited on the 21st.
as foliage component. Interesting notice, using default setting usage of the tree’s as a normal component has much shorter LOD-ranges than when used as foliage. As foliage the trees look good without the need to tweak anything.
The reason to why the LOD ranges are different for you in foliage is due to the fact that your clusters are large, it calculates the distance of the whole cluster so if you have a cluster with a radius of 1000 units it will might cull 1000 units further away depending on where you stand. It switches the LOD level for every mesh in a cluster at once.
We don’t put it on everything, as you don’t usually want branches to have it. Leaves you usually want it, and billboards are usually dominated by leaves, so we stick it on there, too. But there are some cases that doesn’t cover, like grass or palm trees. Then it becomes a case-by-case basis for which materials need it. The color variation node is available for you to add in the material, or you can remove it where you don’t want it. You can also tweak the amount if you want.
Admittedly, we have those values tuned for individual tree actors, where smooth LOD occurs. With smooth LOD, you don’t want it to start LODing immediately (like if the highest LOD is set to 1.0), as it looks weird to see roots and knotholes starting to shrink away when the tree is an arm’s reach away. And, we erred on the side of quality because we can never know where or how someone will want to optimize, and “slow” is relative. We can add an option in the importer for whether the tree will be used in the foliage layer or individually placed. Then we can have different default LOD values for each case.
is due to UE4’s method of two-sided lighting. The backsides not only get drawn, but the normals are flipped before lighting. Normally, when the importer makes a two-sided material, it compensates for by multiplying the normal by the TwoSidedSign node to flip it back. But apparently when there is no normal map on the tree, we don’t add that. We’ll fix the importer to account for that case, but for now you can adjust the material like so:
