Textures / LOD / lighting ... Landscape+Foliage+Quixel assets fall apart with Path Tracer

[mliuzzi]

Somewhat happy with how my scene looks in lit mode, very happy with the new Unreal Reader plugin in Nuke…however

Once I turn on Path Tracer it all looks awful. I’ve attempted to force high quality on everything, allowed Path Tracing in my project settings, but still every element of this scene has deteriorated to a laughable level once I enable path tracing. To be fair the renders do have less noise, but seems to have reduced the quality of everything, especially LOD…with no setting anywhere on the objects, materials, lighting, or project that can make it look even close to how it does in regular lit mode. The models and textures that I created look fine, it’s mainly just everything from Quixel (all imported at Nanite level) and anything to do with the landscape/foliage. If anyone has an idea as to why this is happening I’d love to hear it.

I mean it’s fun to take a walk down memory lane and see how the scene would have looked if I made it ten years ago, but I’d rather just have a specific check box for that

Thanks in advance.

[Arkiras]

@mliuzzi

everything from Quixel (all imported at Nanite level)

The pathtracer uses raytracing, which doesn’t support Nanite meshes. So it falls back to the proxy mesh which is significantly lower quality. You can adjust the fallback proxy mesh triangle percentage in the mesh editor window or you can just import them as regular non-nanite meshes.

[mliuzzi]

Ah thanks, I suspected that might be a reason.

I’m guessing there’s something similar happening with foliage geo changing as well.

[lazamigo]

Hello, I’m having the same issue in my project. I’m trying to work in Path Trace mode and I everything works well except LOD of the trees. I want to make the LOD distance as much as possible and it works in Lit mode. But when I change it to Path Trace mode trees dissappearing. I’m using the Unreal 5.2.