Greetings, I am fairly new to UE5 and am trying to get some things working I’ve hit a serious roadblock with landscape displacement in UE5 and I hope someone can help me:
I understand that landscape tessellation is not a thing in UE5 anymore and the only suitable way for landscape displacement is virtual heightfield mesh with runtime virtual texture. I’ve set it up according to youtube tutorials, however, I’m running into problems:
My RVT for the landscape is incredibly blurry. Whenever I move the camera, the texture is super low detail, then pops into a little better quality but still nowhere near original material quality. Sometimes it pops back and forth even with stationary camera. Settings in my doubleclick RVT → size are 12, 4, 2, however tinkering around with them has no positive effect.
VHFM LODs severely alter the shape of landscape. This means that when I run past a small hill, it literally morphs up and down like a wave. Setting the nearest LOD very far fixes this, but that is obviously not a desired solution.
Some LODs cause massive shadow artifacts, black patches instead of a solid shadow behind a mountain.
No collision on VHFM. This means sometimes even knee deep inside the mesh. From what I gathered, it isn’t supposed to have collisions, but don’t tell me UE5 team is stupid enough to ship a product this size without allowing for collision based landscape displacement. There has to be a solution, if a player saw this, they would instantly quit the game.
Triplanar displacement. I’m using triplanar materials for my landscape (for example mountains and cliffs), is it possible to achieve proper angle displacement, instead of it always going upwards?
Overall, I didn’t find RVT and VHFM to be suitable for landscape displacement. Can the issues above be solved, or is there another way to get landscape displaced? Don’t tell me the only options we have right now are flat terrain, plane-mesh based terrain with textures displacing them or experimental plugin that allows you to have your feet clipping though displaced terrain. UE5 is now a finished and launched product and there has to be a solution to this, for players’ sake.
There are a lot of problem with VHFM…buggy, much more difficult to implement, resolution limits. Virtual texturing is a mandatory requirement also which means your blurry landscape problem is not fixable with the current limitations of VHFM if it is because of the VT resolution limits.
They address a lot of these limitations in Epic’s video on VHFM on their channel (there’s a 1-hour deep dive on this) with a “hopefully more work coming soon” approach but basically that work never came and there has been no resolution to these issues as of yet (and no discussion on fixing them as far as I can tell). Tessellation was deprecated before this as-a-replacement was actually ready for users and then they deleted the forum section where concerns about removing tessellation were widely discussed.
Basically if you need landscape displacement, use UE4 until they either re-enable tessellation in UE5 or finish work on an adequate replacement. UE5 is “full-release” but clearly not ready for landscapes.
ATM UE5 seems to be a in a state where almost everything is experimental and nothing fully finished or working; water plugin, VHFM, volumetric clouds, nanite…lots of things are in a sort of half-baked state and it’s hard to imagine seriously using UE5 until some serious time is spent on fixing and finishing rather than new never-to-be-finished experimental features.
That is actually very discouraging to hear. Can you please expand on the VT resolution limits? The issue is that when i load the level, textures are quite fine, but the moment i move, they start blurring and not loading properly and i have no clue what’s causing that.
Seems like the best option there is would be to add a lot of ground clutter to places where you need displacement, like rocky beach or forest floor, however that will be a massive fps hit I presume…
I would agree it’s discouraging :'D I hope at some point we will see a major pivot from experimental features to fixing the ones that need attention
As for RVT I’ll do a terrible job explaining myself, but I’ll pull up the Epic video timestamp later when I’m not on mobile so you can get it straight from the horse’s mouth
