Performance issue

Development Architectural and Design Visualization
1

hi all. I have an issue with performance in (what I believe is not a heavy) interior scene. when I hit play button and enter full screen, FPS count is really low (better if not in full screen mode). my guess is it has to be a lighting problem, but I haven’t had this issue so far.

I’ve built myself a setting for car rendering in Blender:

WIP_03.jpg
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WIP_04.jpg
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WIP_06.jpg
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now I’m transferring this scene into UE4. it’s not my first interior project and I believe I know what I’m doing. well, obviously not since I run into problems. I’ll try to explain everything as best as I can. I want to make it look as close as possible to these renderings: almost no exterior light - only many ceiling lights.

  1. I’ve created a new level under FPS Blueprint template
  2. I’ve imported a car which is fairly hi-poly (around million polygons) but FPS is good with it and a temporary box brush for ground (no walls)
  3. I’ve created car paint material from here: http://www.caferaces.com/p/tutorials.html. main thing, it uses a SceneCaptureCube for real time reflections for that material. the guy said it could be performance heavy, but FPS is still good up to this point.
  4. with garage model added all is still OK (no lights yet, scene is dark, only light is coming from sky and directional sun through openings in wall - no windows yet)
  5. I’ve put static spot lights in corners and two in the middle of the ceiling so they are not overlapping (of course, every other light is going to be dynamic, due to the number of lights). lights have IES texture applied.
  6. car is set to be dynamic object
  7. furniture in that small adjacent room is set as dynamic (will change it to static)
  8. walls, ceiling and floor is set to be static
  9. now major light is coming from 6 static spot lights in ceiling with IES texture applied
  10. there are 4 reflection capture spheres in room
  11. static wall, ceiling and floor meshes all use 512-1024 lightmaps, and are low-poly objects (i.e. they don’t add much polygons to scene)

at this point when I hit play button and enter full screen mode FPS is really low. I haven’t measured it but my guess is around 10-15fps (on GTX770). obviously something in this setup is causing problems. I don’t think it’s polygon count. I haven’t even added materials to garage and other objects yet. am I having too much reflection spheres? do they not play well with SceneCaptureCube? performance is worse with lights than without them. I haven’t yet tried with other lights (dynamic) added. could it really be that dynamic reflections on car cause such severe fps drop with only 6 lights in scene?

I hope all of this makes sense. any info on possible solution is appreciated. cheers!
(can’t provide any additional screenshots, I’m at work until late evening)

2

hm, it appears that ScreenCaptureCube really IS an issue here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Resources/ContentExamples/Reflections/1_6/index.html

well, that’s a shame. that car paint material really looks awesome with it. I never thought it would make SUCH an impact on performance. good thing it can still be used for recording animations, although not in real time…

3

finished. doesn’t look that bad at all. only performance is somewhat sluggish. if car was static object and with lower polygon count it could’ve been better.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9WoGz6fumUM

4

Use ‘profilegpu’ in the console (~) to see what features you have enabled that are costing a lot. Realtime scene captures cost a lot, especially cube ones.

The scene looks very nice. I would turn down the IndirectLightingIntensity on the light in the white room as it washes out the shadows.

5

The room is static, there’s no need to capture a 3d texture of it every frame. I would capture once and see if performance chances (prolly will a lot)

6

, thx for the tips, will try them out… :wink:

7

Bruno, yeah, I’ve captured reflection in an HDR file. with real time capture framerate was nonexistent…:smiley: the scene isn’t really optimized: the car is hi-poly from evermotion and closed room full of dynamic lights doesn’t help about it… :slight_smile: outside it’s better. and with the car removed performance is nice and smooth… oh well, this was just a test. didn’t expect great performance anyway. I’m just gathering some experience for archviz projects… :wink: