Hi fellow Unreal friends!
Firstly I want to apologize in advance if this is a question that have been on the forums frequently, but I couldn’t seem to find anything like this out there
For quite a while I have been working with some foliage within the engine. And although I have to say I have come a long way from where I started, yet I am not pleased where I am at the moment. I have been searching the web up and down and looked up stuff like; distance texture blur, rendering tips, lighting tips, foliage rendering tips etc, but I cannot achieve quite what I want.
My problem is the quality of the tree or foliage itself when the player goes away from it. I have tried to uncheck the streaming function, changed the filtering etc. I fiddled around with the lighting a lot and I somehow got a better result, thanks to the Landscape demo and it’s lighting. And when I see other artist achieve great results like the Nature Mega Pack on the market place, I wonder if there are some pitfalls I have gotten myself into, because my trees don’t look anything like those I know there are a lot of boosts I can achieve when I start with the post-processing but I feel there is something I am missing. My trees are made within Speedtree and I use the compiler to bring them into Unreal. And I mostly leave the materials by default. I add some SSS and change the material type to the new Two Sided Foliage. It truly helps, but not quite enough.
When I see my asset within the asset viewer it looks a lot better. And the detail on the leaves are quite good, even when I zoom out. The shadows also seams to be a lot better. I dont know if the asset viewer might be a different type of real time rendering than the viewport? The textures of the leaves I use now are 2K.
The trees from a distance
The tree from within the asset viewer
There is a possibility that I have become blind on my own work and this is somewhat the quality range I could aim for. And of course there are no other assets in the scene which would probably affect the lighting as well I believe?
I hope you guys have some tips and tricks for me Thanks alot!