Hi, I’m making some cinematics in UE5.3, and for the last few weeks, I’ve been stumped on the issue of getting my trees to look correct and as close as possible to photoreal in Unreal.
Hopefully, these images help with trying to convey what’s going on here.
I feel like I’ve tried nearly every possible setting, subsurface settings, material settings, lighting both in camera and in the rendering tabs in the project settings. I’ve rebuilt the trees multiple times to make sure it wasn’t an issue with the leaf atlases being too spread out. This also seems like a problem that’s mainly affecting pine trees too. On regular deciduous leafy trees, this seems not to be occurring as bad. All this black splotchiness, lack of translucency depth, harsh shadows, no soft AO. I’ve completely run out of ideas, and everything online has led to dead-ends. If there’s any insight anyone possibly has from similar issues, I’d be forever grateful.
The only thing I really haven’t tried yet is setting up the materials completely from scratch and disregarding the speed tree master material that’s connected to all the material instances. I really don’t want to go there, mainly because I won’t have any wind on the trees and also this would be extremely annoying to do for multiple different tree materials.
what does the leaf master material look like? how is the opacity setup? first screen shot has dithering artefacts in the top right corner. needles are fine grained texture.
i’d guess the texture is too detailed (needles are tricky), it’s lacking mip maps, or the opacity mask is using the dither option which you should untick.
heres what it looks like. For some reason I believe the color/opacity is mixed into one image. And there doesn’t seem to be a dither option on the image settings in order to get the opacity looking better.
okay. first of all… you’re out of video memory. could cause some issues. not sure if that’s the case for the leafes.
second… the texture looks kinda “bad”. all repetitive bark and lil space for the leafes. jpeg compression doesn’t do it any favor. can’t tell exactly. looks very semi-transparent in this lil corner for the leafes.
third… the opacity is connected directly to the speed tree master material. no clue what’s goin on in there, but if it’s not using any magic on this bad texture, this could be the issue. the overall general opacity clip and dithering is controlled with those 2 check boxes.
i reckon you gotta balance those and potentially tweak the texture to get a proper alpha channel going. this texture looks pretty bad, tbh.
Now that you’re mentioning it yeah I have no idea why SpeedTree is packing the bark texture like that. It seems to not be causing too much of an issue for the bark itself.
But I have no idea if its affecting the colour/opacity being packed that way.
As for the semi-transparentness of it, I’ve got the alpha min set to zero now and that seems to make the image more opaque, but its definitely causing the trees to look more blocky as there’s no range of opacity happening on the needles to give a small translucent effect. I’ve also set the opacity mask Clip to 0.333 as I’ve seen others online say that’s usually a good number. I went into the speed tree master material and changed the dither opacity mask box to on. It unfortunately didn’t seem to visually change anything though.
It’s really annoying that speedtree combines these maps into one. I could maybe try a different export setting, but this is the only one I’ve found that smoothly gets the tree into Unreal with wind.
As for the video memory. I don’t think it’s the problem as I’ve seen people have this same problem with beefier specs than me. But then again I’m absolutely no expert when it comes to what’s happening under the hood of unreal.
