I got the speed tree editor and I really like it but I must say I seem to be getting very poor performance compared to some of what I have seems out there.
For starters if I get more than about 50 trees at a good distance “prolly 100m” away my frame-rate chugs. Yet I’m seeing people on relatively modest machine showing off great looking senes with about 500 trees and over 200,000 instance of grass and still getting 60 FPS!
I’m justing the confer Desktop model from the free pack. I even reduced it a little and then spit one out at around 100, 80, and 65 fee tall. took them all in and placed them. But as I said if I get more than about 30-50 of them on the screen it tanks performance. Another thing is they don’t seem the be loading down as much as they should. they all cam into unreal with separate billboard models but those done seem to be manually loadable and I can’t seem to get the trees to swap to them no matter how far I get from them.
1: How can I sped up performance?
2: How can I get more trees one the scene? I still have to do grass n stuff.
3: Is there a way I can control how far before they old down to billboards?
All three of these are kind of related with speeding up performance.
You’ll want to make sure that you’re making LODs for your SpeedTree models. LODs are important for performance because the further you get away from the model you’ll want to reduce the poly count that is being rendered to get more FPS out of your scene.
You can setup and view the LODs by opening the mesh from the Content Browser in the Mesh Viewer. You can leave it set to auto-LOD distance or you can set the LOD distances your self if that doesn’t fit you needs.
Next when you’re using the Foliage Painter you’ll want to use Cull Distances for some of your foliage objects like grass where you wouldn’t see it at certain distances.
