[UE4] Stick with landscape/landmass or convert to fbx?
polycounter lvl 7
So I was playing about with landmass and the previous landscape tools and blocked out a scene. Now me being absolutely confused about unreal's landscape plethora of numbers and resolutions, I have ended up with a landscape of 18M tris, oops! I'm not struggling with the scene at all so far, but as I want to start texturing, and then populating with speedtree meshes, will the engine cope with me keeping the landmass stuff or do I convert to fbx and downsize? I was planning on trying a landscape layered blend material but that won't work with static meshes, safe to assume I'd just have to paint those externally then?
Basically I'm very happy with the look of my scene so far and I have tried recreating it with a much lower landscape size but just couldn't make it look as good as my primary scene. Given my texturing/speedtree plans will the engine cope with the high poly count? The scene is just a standalone scene, won't be incorporated in a game and whatnot. Much appreciate any suggestions
Basically I'm very happy with the look of my scene so far and I have tried recreating it with a much lower landscape size but just couldn't make it look as good as my primary scene. Given my texturing/speedtree plans will the engine cope with the high poly count? The scene is just a standalone scene, won't be incorporated in a game and whatnot. Much appreciate any suggestions
Replies
I'd take it as low as I could before noticing a visual drop and leave it there. I cant imagine you need 18m tris for anything... usually for really hi res terrain features you'd put in like a megascans cliff or something like that.
Working with the landscape system versus a regular model will have benefit of flexibility in engine. You'll be able to paint and sculpt tweaks as you need to.
As far as performance, that depends on many things besides jsut the landscape triangles. You'll just have to test and see. The density and how fast you LOD your foliage will probably be the biggest thing.
If you don't need high quality reflections you can turn on forward shading and that will make a big performance boost.
A great example to learn from is the Rural Australia pack that is available for free on the marketplace. Check out the engine.ini file for a few settings that the author has used to increase fidelity like a hidden TAA setting, etc. If you are going to render animations wiht the foliage swaying in wind you'll want to take a look at those especially. Lots of techniques to mitigate ghosting and keep the render looking sharp.
Then, in the LOD distributiuon panel, hover over this sliders for description and adjust them as you need. The settings I have there is a good mix for readable landscape shapes at distances up to 1km, but not more detail than really needed for that.