Hey there, We use this tool in our company and I decided to purchase it for myself recently. However the folder structure is completely different. Our company has rdLODToolsEditor and rdLODTools. Both of these folders are located in project folder rather than editor/marketplace/rdLODTools. Are there any specific versions that are targeted for project plugin folder only (non-binaries, pure source)? Because I would very like to have the plugin located at project folder, rather than in the engine itself â To have more controll over all other projects.
Sorry I was looking through FAQ and did not find what I was looking for so sorry in advance if this has been answered before
Those assets get automatically copied over into your project the first time you create a LOD - you shouldnât need to do anything other than create one to get all the files.
Youâre right, I havenât really mentioned that anywhere - Iâll add it to the documentation.
Also another question, I somehow managed to âhackâ getting the rdLODs to ue 4.27 as a 5.0 version to get the special context menus when right clicking(need the special operations for multiple meshes at once) and ran into a problem that is kind of annoying. Every time I run the plugin, I get a message that the plugin was designed for UE5 etc etc. So in UPlugin file i changed version to 4.26.2 (which I am using), however now it shows that plugin was designed for 4.26.2, which is kinda cringe, since I am using that exact version. Do you know how could I tell the engine that this version is compatible and make him stop complaining? It is very annoying to see that every time I launch
Hello! Iâm using rdTexTools and have had no problems so far, but today itâs doing something strange that I canât seem to solve.
Whenever I invoke the UI, the dialog panel pops up underneath the parent window, where it canât be interacted with. If I go to the Taskbar and hover over the UE window group, I see the rdTexTools panel alongside my other UE windows. Selecting it from Taskbar makes it draw for basically one frame, but long before I could move a mouse cursor to it, itâs back behind the editor window again.
Closing and reopening the editor doesnât help. This may be a video driver problem, because Iâm using this tool from a spare laptop while my main system is being repaired, and I donât think I have tried using rdTexTools on this machine before. But I also havenât used rdTexTools since I recently upgraded from UE 5.2 to 5.2.1, so it could also be related to the UE version â which is why Iâm checking in here.
Are there any suggestions of things I should try, to get this working? Thanks!
Iâve just gone through and tested all the UI panels in 5.2.1 and wasnât able to reproduce the error here - it does sound like it could be a driver issue - first thing to try anyway.
Some things to try:
A reboot of your laptop rather than log off/on or sleep
Make sure youâre using the latest nvidia driver
If youâre using the GameReady driver, try installing the Studio driver - or visa-versa
Turn off any window animation in windows
Disable any auto-docking software, or the built-in docking
Let me know how you get on - hopefully one of these will fix the issueâŚ
I apologize â it was a Windows problem. I realized this an hour after posting here, when Windows Explorer itself started misbehaving. Rebooting the computer fixed it, and rtTexTools is working just fine again. Thanks for the response. FWIW, I just recommended this tool to others on a Discord programming channel.
And also the full sphere support, since thatâs really the most important thing for me for the imposters to be actually usable.
I have not really been following the development of this since I tried the initial imposter version of rdLODTools back in April, since all those issues unfortunately meant the imposters were not actually usable in practice in my game - how does it look like now?
I have done more work on it, and will do a little more before releasing another update, but Iâm currently working on updating something else first. I have done the full sphere support, and the âweird cube shapeâ is improved, but I want to get it exact, so will put some more effort into that.
A lot of the issues youâve described are just things that octahedral impostors canât do - the sizes issue for instance. Seeing as rdLODtools is just creating the source files for the existing OctahedralImpostor shaders, thereâs not a lot I can do.
However, I do know how to fix all of those issues in another type - âDual Axis Billboardsâ - I want to continue work on them in the not-to-distant-future too - but after releasing some other products, so itâs not something to âhold your breathâ for.
Anyway, Iâll post here once Iâve released an updated version.
You mean itâs ânormalâ that only uniform scale is supported with octahedral imposters? I canât quite believe that, since that would mean theyâre basically always unusable for any foliage - foliage is rarely uniform scale, foliage is usually randomly scaled a bit in all directions since thatâs the easiest and most efficient way to get a lot more variation. Non-uniform scale just has to be supported in some way by LODs if they should be practically usable, I cannot adjust my foliage to have uniform scale without hugely downgrading the visuals of the game.
Is there any reason why youâre bound to the limitations of the âexisting OctahedralImpostor shadersâ? Canât you just create your own version of them with a few modifications, like supporting non-uniform scale? Thatâs generally how I assumed rdLODTools would do it, before you mentioned that itâs using the original shaders for that. Since the original shaders were just a small pet project by someone at Epic, itâs a bit of a miracle that they even still work - I think itâs good to assume they will probably sooner or later be removed from the engine anyways, since itâs just not a feature Epic cares about keeping up to date. They removed much larger and more used things (like tesselationâŚ) So it would also be a lot âsaferâ to not have to rely on them, but have it all fully done by rdLODTools shaders.
Interesting, how would those âDual Axis Billboardsâ work? Would they just be generally âbetterâ than octahedral imposters, or would they also have downsides? Googling for âDual Axis Billboardsâ doesnât seem to show any results related to LODs, do they also have some different name maybe?
I choose to do it this way as many people have worked on their own versions of the OctahedralImposter shaders, fixing things and adding new features - I wanted to make sure that rdLODtools works for everything.
I have made a fork of the original Imposter code and could do work on that, but these days things like season and health shaders are a part of a lot of peoples âwant listâ so they would be using different versions anyway.
Regarding the âDual-axis Billboardâ - thatâs just a name I came up with for my own routines - mainly just to differentiate it from Impostors. The concept is the same as impostors, but just uses planes rather than an octahedran. The way the plane is positioned is different - I calculate that directly with the camera->plane rather than use UV tricks so it works in all situations. Also, the textures are different - much less memory - but the lighting wonât be as good (I havenât finished that part so just guessing it wonât be as good).
Iâm a bit confused by what you mean there? Are there really any other âversions of the OctahedralImposter shadersâ that exist anywhere that I could use instead of Epics implementation, and that also work with rdLODTools? Is that really something that exists? Iâm happy to check it out if it does, but so far Iâve never heard of anything like that.
But if you have a fork already, why not just ship it and allow people to choose if they want to use your version or Epics version or another version? Iâm quite sure 99% of people would want to use a native improved version from rdLODTools over the shader from Epic that hasnât been updated in 5 years.
I donât know of any publicly available ones you can use - One I was thinking of is the MegaScans trees - they have a custom switch in theirs to display seasonal textures.
Note that they donât fix the resizing issue though.
Iâve got this tutorial on my website about using the github version of the Impostors:
I may add to the fork in the future - but it will probably be easier to get the Dual-Axis Billboards working well with light than fix the resizing in the Impostors (In fact the only reason the lighting would be worse is if the depth map is turned off when creating).
Iâm trying to create small assets from megascans nanite static meshes as placeholders to keep the project small. I created a lod1 with 0.1% vertices and tried to remove lod0 using rdLODtools and it didnât work. I only see lod0 and itâs broken.
If youâre just wanting to reduce the number of triangles in LOD0, just go into the âReduction Settingsâ with LOD0 selected, and change the âPercent Trianglesâ there - you donât need to create a new LOD and delete the old LOD.
My goal is to create a new file that contains only the lod1, the original file is 130MB and Iâd like to get to a few 100KB. And not use the original file until the final render phase.
I didnât really design it to do that - when you remove all but the billboards or impostors it removes all the mesh data apart from a plane, but when you remove LOD0 and keep a reduced version, it retains the full vertex data but stores the reduction value.
However it doesnât look like it would be too hard to implement something like that, Iâm working on an update for rdLODtools atm anyway so Iâll see if I can add it for the update.
Iâm working on the reduction system now, but thought you might be interested to hear that when you package your project, the mesh is packaged at the reduced size, so although in the editor itâs the full size, the final packaged project will be reduced.
Ok, thanks. My goal is to have smaller assets to use as proxy for working in the editor and source control and later swap them for the high res assets for the final product. The nanite libraries are just too large to keep on the source control system as is.
