to begin: I have a really hard time understanding optimization in UE4, I just can’t wrap my head around it.
I wanted to increase my fps and had read somewhere that combining actors to one bigger mesh should improve framerate etc.
but I combined some objects a little too much, this resulted in always having the same (combined) actor rendered constantly. which should be split in 3 or 4 seperate actors to improve framerate.
I can’t undo the combining anymore because it hit me quite late that I had to split it.
is there a way to decombine/seperate/detach the models from each other?
You need a 3rd party program such as Blender (free). You would need to select the parts individually and then export them, then re-import into UE.
Also check your mesh triangle count, to optimize use meshes with a lower triangle count, or look at lights if you use any, disable dynamic light from light sources for instance.
I have done all that, my scene only uses a lightsource and a skylight with a lightmassimportancevolume. the only thing i can see which is very heavy is when I use the shader complexity viewport, it shows that my trees are darkred and de fog in the distance is bright white (which is very bad I understood).
Add a Cull Distance Volume to fade (cull) out objects in the distance. For trees use trees with max 10 maybe single trees with 20k triangles, everthing higher is not feasible, a normal tree can be optimized to around 5-8 maybe 10 k and still look decent. There are also very good trees with 2k triangles, blend them with higher counts.
does cull distance volume work with painted foliage, because my scene has a lot of trees and grass. for the trees and grass I have set a culling amount each (in the foliage painting mode) which works quite wel for me.
Additional many trees (like with Speedtree) offer LOD levels when imported, but this can look a bit sad sometimes so i normally relay on culling, at least for isolated trees, besides the cull volume there is a cull distance option in each mesh (panel setting).
how does the profiler for the GPU and CPU work, you can see which task is taking the most time to complete, but how can I find the source of the task so I can optimize it to run better?
