My forest level!

Hmmm… So I’m the first one to complete the Unreal Environment Design course and post about it?
Here is a video walkthrough of my level:

Thank you Michael Kocha! It’s been a short and sweet course.
I know the final part of my level could use some more work but I think I’m going to move on and apply what I learned to another project.

Some caveats/issues I’ve found:

  • Adding Highest Quality foliage from Quixel Megascans killed my project’s performance with the little foliage I added. Well, no wonder. Its textures are 8k (yikes!) and foliage is not supported by Nanite, so I tried High Quality for my foliage assets and that worked remarkably well, without any big fps dips. Still, 4k textures… a bit of overkill for background assets, but ok.
  • Megascans does have a collection of tree assets: Megascans Trees: European Black Alder (early access) in Megascans - UE Marketplace, though they are in Early Access and so ridiculous in detail that again, they are not viable as an option for UE 5 until Nanite supports foliage. They seem to work fine on UE4 though, I can zoom through the Asset Zoo level at 120 FPS in my ageing development system. :man_shrugging:
    I ended up using these trees, very sparingly as you can see due to the performance hit: temperate Vegetation: Spruce Forest in Props - UE Marketplace
  • I can’t remove any foliage, just add more. I would have to delete the foliage actor and start over, which doesn’t sound like fun in a big level. Am I missing anything?

Well, that’s it. Any comments and feedback are greatly appreciated!

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Man I can’t wait for this course to drop on the main site! :grinning:

Beautifully done.

Also it’s been a while, but I think you can erase foliage by holding Shift while painting with LMB. Only being able to add foliage doesn’t sound right.

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Oh, so that’s why. It’s in Early Access.
I knew there should be some reason I can’t add the 12_ML_EED tag to my post.

Thank you! I’ve looked into it and turns out I had Erase Density at 1 and it works the exact opposite of Paint Density: 0 means it removes everything and 1 it removes only some instances here and there. No wonder it didn’t work as expected. :sweat_smile:
But indeed shift+LMB is the shortcut for erasing foliage.

The performance issues with the foliage remain, but I might try this funny workaround:

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Not being an artist myself I’m not quite sure I understand exactly what’s being shown in the video. It looks like he took a tree megascan and then enabled Nanite on it in the mesh editor. Out of curiosity, is that the ‘workaround’ you’re referring to? What would be the non-workaround method? My guess would be importing the tree normally with various LODs or auto-generating them within the editor?

Well, megascans trees look nothing like those, they are awesome. Those look like quick and very dirty 3d tree scans the author of the video himself made or took from somewhere else, but from a distance do look like trees and converted to Nanite they won’t take a big hit on performance.

So the workaround would be to use Nanite-enabled static meshes, yes, although you can add them as foliage for convenience. The con is that they can’t have any per-vertex animation.

The non-workaround would be pretty much what you say, but the LODs don’t seem to help much. It seems the impostor systems for foliage developed in UE4 don’t work out of the box on UE5 so that would be an option too if I can make them work somehow.
I’m not an expert, though, so all I can do for now is being very mindful of the foliage placement and density or go Nanite static mesh. I tried setting Cull Distance and that either doesn’t help in my level or introduces popping which is quite jarring.

Hmm, I wonder if you could use the per-vertex animated meshes up close but swap them with a Nanite-enabled static mesh at a custom distance. Might not be too jarring if the animation is subtle enough at the swap distance.

Unfortunately I haven’t had much time to dig into the foliage or imposter systems yet, but this is a rather interesting problem. That said, tree tech has been around and evolving for a while, so I’m guessing there are already some good options out there.

That would be the ideal solution indeed, but I have no idea how I would implement such a system. I’d need to do some more research on the subject, but right now I’d rather make a game to test myself on what I’ve learned so far and as a warm-up for the upcoming game jam.

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