The next support stream will be covering foliage in 4.8 and the Procedural Foliage Actor. Anyone who is making a project with large worlds will want to tune in!
WHAT
Learn about foliage features in the upcoming 4.8 from Senior Technical Artist.
WHERE
Follow us on the official Unreal Engine Twitch channel:
WHEN
Tuesday, March 24th @ 2:00-3:00PM EST Countdown]
WHO
, Senior Technical Artist
, (@]())
Feel free to ask any questions on the topic in the thread below, and remember, while we try to give attention to all inquiries, it’s not always possible to answer’s questions as they come up. This is especially true for off-topic requests, as it’s rather likely that we don’t have the appropriate person around to answer. Thanks for understanding!
Edit: The YouTube archive is now available here](?v=3ispyNxpRyg&feature=youtu.be)
I’ve had a to mess around with 4.8, and the landscape and procedural foliage volumes are ! one thing I noticed however is that there is no z-offset available, as there is in the foliage tool - is this on purpose, or is it going to be added? It’s an incredibly useful feature that cuts down on environment workload, especially for “big stroke” work.
Also, the grass output tiles will make my life so much easier/better, but it would be if there was a feathering modifier - typically, the type of flora you would see with a foliage tool like this would be sparse on the edge of the mask/splatmap, and thick inside.
I noticed that gusting was added to the wind actor, any we’ll see more of those parameters exposed? IIRC, it’s either set to gust, or not gust, but I could be mistaken.
Finally, I don’t and won’t pretend to understand how the procedural foliage volumes work, but it sounds like ‘tiles’ are generated and re-used across the volume. Being able to edit these tiles by hand (and have them in turn reused by the foliage volume) would be tremendous in terms of being able to add fine detail to large areas without spending a lot of time doing so.
Cool features. There was a comment about using the foliage tool to create buildings. I’m curious though about a question that was answered, basically asking if mobs/NPC’s could be spawned using the system. Does this system allow for those animations/AI? The placement of NPC’s would also tie into the navmesh as well.
As long as you set up your material right, it appears as though you can make either a landscape actor or static mesh spawn “grass”, or other static meshes of your choosing.
Guess I’ll have to catch up on YouTube.