often I need to create landscapes with a lot of forest on the hills and mountains in large distance. For this purpose I have already bought numerous trees in Unreal’s marketplace. Unfortunately, almost all trees have the problem that they do not look good at distance. I also noticed that in the screenshots in the marketplace, many products don’t have any distance pictures included at all because many manufacturers seem to know that their trees don’t look good at a distance. Does anyone know where I can get trees for the background? In Microsoft Flight Simulator, for example, they look pretty good. Even when backlit.
Most of the time the far away trees are being displayed as either Billboards or Impostors - both of which are using 2D images of the mesh rather than the actual mesh. They’re so much faster it does pay to use them when you can.
To get both speed and better looking far trees you can use a program such as rdLODtools (it’s on the marketplace) to create your own custom far LODs and tweak the colors and sub-surface amounts yourself to fit in with your scenes.
It also has tools to create Single Triangle LODs - about as fast as you can get - perfect for far away trees.
Once you’ve created the Billboard/Triangle etc it’s also possible to remove all other LODs - leaving just the high speed LOD as the only mesh.
I’d suggest disabling everything from view except the foliage, isolating sections of it, converting them to meshes, merging actors, snapping an impostor of the merged actor, and using the impostor insted of foliage by setting a more aggressive render distance.
This works in so long as you don’t allow zoom/scopes and your terrain/foliage cannot be modified - while also taking several hours of dedicated work for each “flange” of forest you isolate.
Results can be really good looking if you bump up the quality of the impostor and use octhedral impostors for them.
It actually works well for replacing foliage on landscape tiles as well.