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1. Re: Tree lighting and Normals problems in UE4

   

   Reply by drliamj · Jul 2018 · Home› Unreal Engine

   Hey thanks for all your help! Really think I'm getting somewhere now. I've found a couple of good lighting settings in speedtree and messed with the shader a bit. I would still like to steal the normals from a half sphere but that can't be done in speedtree. Basically speedtree pushes the normals out from the parent, in…

2. Re: Tree lighting and Normals problems in UE4

   

   

   Reply by drliamj · Jul 2018 · Home› Unreal Engine

   But like seriously WTF is going on here. I'm using all the right material and shader settings in UE4, and have followed the advice given to me by speedtree and still lighting looks so bad. Like, no matter what the normals are set to. There is no way of having those nice spherical normals so now I'm just wondering how…

3. Re: Tree lighting and Normals problems in UE4

   

   Reply by drliamj · Jul 2018 · Home› Unreal Engine

   Heard of this technique a lot. I wish there were options for doing that inside speedtree. As it is, I find the vertex normal options in speedtree a little underwhelming, and exporting trees as meshes and having it all work properly is really annoying! 

4. Re: Tree lighting and Normals problems in UE4

   

   Reply by drliamj · Jun 2018 · Home› Unreal Engine

   Yeah, With the Speedtree import into ue4 there is no option for changing normals so I think that's all good by default. The normals are set up all nicely actually. Sonya from Speedtree 'fixed' my tree but it still doesn't light nicely... So maybe I should have less intersections with my leaf cards? That's where the…

5. Re: Tree lighting and Normals problems in UE4

   

   Reply by poopipe · Jul 2018 · Home› Unreal Engine

   Speedtree 7 has options for bending canopy normals for this exact purpose. I imagine it's still there in v8

6. Re: Tree lighting and Normals problems in UE4

   

   Reply by poopipe · Jun 2018 · Home› Unreal Engine

   Speedtree has (or had) a couple of sliders for bending the canopy normals . I'd start by finding that. 

7. Re: Tree lighting and Normals problems in UE4

   

   Reply by poopipe · Jul 2018 · Home› Unreal Engine

   Same as a normal map, encode a direction into an rgb value and then do something useful with it in your ue material. I have no idea on the mechanics of this as I've not tried it with speedtree

8. Re: Tree lighting and Normals problems in UE4

   

   Reply by poopipe · Jul 2018 · Home› Unreal Engine

   Your problem there is that if you want to keep a live speedtree mesh you can't do things like that afaik. you could theoretically encode some normal information into vertex colour and/or do something clever with a shader - which is probably what they've done in the witcher 

9. Re: Tree lighting and Normals problems in UE4

   

   

   Reply by drliamj · Jun 2018 · Home› Unreal Engine

   Ideally I would like to achieve lighting like this, where the back side look unified to the front. Love the foliage lighting in the Witcher 3. and they are speedtrees so any advice on getting this sort of lighting in UE4?

10. Re: Tree lighting and Normals problems in UE4

    

    

    Reply by Mark Dygert · Jun 2018 · Home› Unreal Engine

    Yep speedtree has the normal editing options built in. it helps a lot, but normal editing alone can only minimize the problem it can't solve it fully. In Unreal when you import, make sure that the Normal Import Method is set to "Import Normals and tangents". I think it defaults to "compute normals" which will reset any…