In this Training Stream: Alan Willard, hot off working on VFX for Unreal Tournament, will dive into the Material Editor and show you how to effectively us Mesh Displacement to achieve some awesome effects!
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 everyone’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!
Alan, , Zak and Andrew Kramer are the tutorial Gods. All hail the fantastic four
EDIT: Quick suggestion to Epic. If possible, it would be nice to see a quick preview (screenshot or video) of what we can expect from stream (for future streams also).
Question: In every single attempt that I’ve made to make anything with Tessellation and Displacement, the effect was simply way way WAY too expensive. Are there any ways / future plans to optimize it?
The initial cost of tessellation is too high in UE4 atm that just makes it unusable for production.
There are currently many BIG problems with tessellation in UE4. One of which being this:
Generally speaking tessellation is expensive but in an engine like Frostbite 3 tessellation is very well optimized that not only they use it for landscapes but they also use it for rocks, trees and such things.
JackP has already mentioned they’ll look into it for 4.13 and find out why the cost is too high.
They are fixed pretty well, but for a 8K landscape maybe 2-3 hours of boring work.
In Maya there is a tool for UVs named “Relax UV”. Should be interesting similar tool in UE to fix the breaking seams.
I didnt say anything about a tool. I uploaded those photos to help people with the same problem in versions of UE <4.12.
A way to fixing them, nothing else. Sometimes there are only a few of them.
Another easy way to remove all cracks in only one click.
-Asign a black mate material to whole landscape + displacement. All cracks are seen as white color.
-Change the camera from Perspective to TOP in order to see the whole landscape.
-Select Landscape Tool> Sculp > Noise
Brush Size 65536.0
Brush Fallout 1
Strenght 0.0001
Target Value?
Noise Mode Raise (I think Raise is better because all cracks normally appear in slopes and cliffs, not in plain zones. To raise down the walkable area or to remome some anomalous pikes and crests that come from WorldMachine select Lower Mode)
Noise Scale 1 ¿?
-Place the cursor in the center of the landscape and click (wait 10-20sec). If the landscape is too big, for example resize it from 100 to 25 , and then, turn back again to 100.
We’re trying to generate terrain with a rocky shape to it.
The terrain is an array of cubes which border each other, so we’re also wanting to have each block of terrain slot into the next one, leaving no gaps. We have tried factoring in vertex normal (like in your great fireball tutorial), and this leads to large gaps between the blocks.
The technique we’re looking at right now is using a WorldPosition-driven noise function outputting -1 to 1 to drive the displacement directly, with tesselation to add vertices to our simple cube mesh - this works great as vertices are displaced in the same direction based on the noise function, “jigsawing” them.
However we’re stuggling to find a way to generate the noise in a way which leads to an omnidirectional displacement, as the noise function is either positive or negative for the entire vector -
we have tried combining 3 noise functions to form a vector by appending, and this does work for jigsawing and omnidirectional displacement. (E: but it looks extremely jagged)
But are there any clever/more efficient methods we may have missed?
