I’m creating foliage assets and I’m taking photos of both sides of each leaf. Now I’m wondering if two-sided materials are even used that much in real-life projects due to computational costs. Since I wasn’t able to find much information on the subject I decided to post it here. Has UE5.x introduced any optimization developments on two-sided foliage with Nanite?
I’m not quite sure about nanite, though I can tell you that 99.99% of foliage is two sided. Though I guess that really only pertains to alpha card/billboard foliage. If you’re creating actual geometry assets that aren’t just cut outs of planes then they wouldn’t be two sided. Not sure how many real geometry leaves have ever been created though.
EDIT: My apologies, I just realized you meant two sided as in having two different textures for each side. I wouldn’t imagine that the computational cost would be that high, you would just be calling on two different textures for the leaf. As long as you dont have 100 different leaves on your tree you keep the number very small you should be fine. A better way to do this would be to take a single picture of multiple branches lined up next to one another and use that as your texture. Think of like an atlas. That way you have only two textures for example, 4 different branches. One texture for each, front and back. I’m just thinking here, as I have no experience taking pictures and using those as textures but I could imagine it would work.
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