Ways to limit or disable Skeletal Mesh LODs?

Legacy UDK Programming and UnrealScript
1

So I’ve finally got a cool morph target effect imported, except I noticed it sometimes plays quite jerkily in-game, if the camera isn’t very close to the model.
Any way to disable that type of LOD stuff?

I already tried this “Scale Set MaxDrawDistanceScale X” and it didn’t seem to do anything btw.

2

Not sure if this helps, but if you mean for fluid surface components (like it seems you are showing in your video), there is a FluidUpdateRate param that controls the update rate, which you could adjust based on distance from the camera.



/** Fluid update rate in number of updates per second */
var(Fluid)     float            FluidUpdateRate;

If you’re not using a FluidSurfaceComponent, and this is a skeletal mesh you are showing, I would look into using it, as it has this fx built-in.

3

Thank you but I’ll stay away from those, I’ve tried Fluid Surfaces before and not only are they much harder to control properly, they are very bad when it comes to behaving exactly the same way regardless of camera distance or whether they’re viewed through a real camera or a 2D capture camera.
There really ought to be a way to disable LOD completely for a mesh, or at worst a way to temporarily toggle it off for all assets during special scenes, it would be really strange if there wasn’t.

4

there’s another scale var, IIRC it’s ‘scale set SkeletalMeshLODBias’ - that allows pushing the skel mesh LOD distance
that, or tweak your skelmesh LOD distance values in the skelmesh asset directly
or, if you just want to do it for specific actor, the skeletalmeshcomponent has some LOD control as well

your linked video shows something completely unrelated, some fluid surface stuff :slight_smile:

5

I use this in the skeletalmeshcomponent:



/** If 0, auto-select LOD level. if >0, force to (ForcedLodModel-1). */
var() int        ForcedLodModel;

I check periodically the NPC distance, if it is in a range then ForceLodModel = 1. That mantains the lod0 in these range.

I use it only with bigger NPCs.

6

Thanks for the tip.
And the video, that waving effect is actually done by cycling 4 morph targets, not fluid surfaces, I’m planning to include lots of similar effects albeit less water-like.

Cool, thanks. Really hope this works at preventing morph target stutter.