Any Unreal Engine Experts Here?

[Renzatic]

Regarding not worrying about it now, are you saying at this point in the project, or are you saying in the big picture of learning?

A bit of column A, and a bit of column B.

You're still square in newbie land, and learning how to set up LODs while you're still learning the ins and outs of basic mesh work strikes me as putting the cart before the horse. Stick to learning materials and modeling. They're the foundation of everything you'll be doing. Efficiency can come later.

 

[Huntn]

A bit of column A, and a bit of column B.

You're still square in newbie land, and learning how to set up LODs while you're still learning the ins and outs of basic mesh work strikes me as putting the cart before the horse. Stick to learning materials and modeling. They're the foundation of everything you'll be doing. Efficiency can come later.

OMG, not directed at you but to the UE teaching system. Watching all of this content to better understand LODs, teeth nashing for several days, all I have to do is pick an asset, assign it to a LOD Group (like small prop), and UE does the rest. It still appears as a single asset in UE, but it magically works now with however many LODs the UE engine gave it, all contained in one. And by looking at it in the editor, by moving away from it you can see the lower LOD resolutions kick in.

Yes there is more to learn about LOD settings, the intro seems to be a confusing mess. But eventually I will return to the tutorial LOD section and see if I can glean any wisdom from it
Now I did have to add some script to the UE ini file.

Work in progress
Maybe too cluttered in the foreground?
Working on thinning it out...
But there will be tall grass too... ​

 

[Renzatic]

OMG, not directed at you but to the UE teaching system. Watching all of this content to better understand LODs, teeth nashing for several days, all I have to do is pick an asset, assign it to a LOD Group (like small prop), and UE does the rest.

Yeah, the official UE material is more than likely to get super technical on you, and lead you the long way around when it comes to doing things. I've always found it best to find 3rd party tutorials that explain things a little more straightforwardly, and only hit up the official documentation when you're looking for something specific.

You're road's looking great, by the way. A couple things I'd recommend you do is up the scaling on the grass texture a bit, so the individual blades aren't so big and noticeable. Also, tweak the colors of your diffuse textures a bit, so they'll blend together a little more nicely.

UE handles things a little weirdly when it comes to tweaking hue, saturation, and light values, but it can be done.

Image Adjustment | Unreal Engine 4.27 Documentation

docs.unrealengine.com

Unreal Materials Parameters - Tip of the Week - Evermotion

 

[Huntn]

Yeah, the official UE material is more than likely to get super technical on you, and lead you the long way around when it comes to doing things. I've always found it best to find 3rd party tutorials that explain things a little more straightforwardly, and only hit up the official documentation when you're looking for something specific.

You're road's looking great, by the way. A couple things I'd recommend you do is up the scaling on the grass texture a bit, so the individual blades aren't so big and noticeable. Also, tweak the colors of your diffuse textures a bit, so they'll blend together a little more nicely.

UE handles things a little weirdly when it comes to tweaking hue, saturation, and light values, but it can be done.

Image Adjustment | Unreal Engine 4.27 Documentation

docs.unrealengine.com

Unreal Materials Parameters - Tip of the Week - Evermotion

I’ve been looking at that grass, but I’ve wondered how it will look after I add tall grass, and post processing. It’s easy to scale it down, and agree it should not be that big.

The next job is to learn how to scatter paint assets like twigs and small rocks.

 

[Renzatic]

I’ve been looking at that grass, but I’ve wondered how it will look after I add tall grass, and post processing. It’s easy to scale it down, and agree it should not be that big.

It probably won't be too noticeable once you get the tall grass in, but it'd be one of those things I'd tweak just in case. If it looks good by itself, it'll look good in any situation.

The next job is to learn how to scatter paint assets like twigs and small rocks.

The good news there is that, from what I understand, that's fairly easy to do. You bring in your model, go to your paint panel, guff around with the scatter settings, and go to town.

 

[Huntn]

It probably won't be too noticeable once you get the tall grass in, but it'd be one of those things I'd tweak just in case. If it looks good by itself, it'll look good in any situation.



The good news there is that, from what I understand, that's fairly easy to do. You bring in your model, go to your paint panel, guff around with the scatter settings, and go to town.

Gonna do a scatter painting tutorial today. When the Forest Scene guy does it he picks what looks like bunches of small assets together. I’m going to assume at this point for each one, he has to apply a material to it first. I’ve got another thing I have to quickly look at, the HLOD hierarchal level of detail.

 

[Renzatic]

Gonna do a scatter painting tutorial today. When the Forest Scene guy does it he picks what looks like bunches of small assets together. I’m going to assume at this point for each one, he has to apply a material to it first. I’ve got another thing I have to quickly look at, the HLOD hierarchal level of detail.

Yeah, each model has its own materials and LODs. Think of the scatter paint not as some special mode that uses specific materials and model types, but as an easy way to bring in lots of little models into your scene quickly without having to copy/paste them all in one at a time by hand.

 

[Renzatic]

Man, you've gone silent on me!

I've been working on upping my sculpting skills recently. It is fun as hell. Made these weird little things I call Yard Idols.

 

[Huntn]

Man, you've gone silent on me!

I've been working on upping my sculpting skills recently. It is fun as hell. Made these weird little things I call Yard Idols.

View attachment 10243

Wow, looks great!
I've been working silently instead of overwhelming you with daily questions... so here is my latest just for you, well and the UE Forums where I just posted it there too, but I usually get a better response here than there.

Texture Streaming Pool over 162.827 MiB Budget. Ok I just read this article:

Fixing ‘Texture Streaming Pool Over Budget’ in Unreal - techarthub

The texture streaming system is a vital part of Unreal Engine's ecosystem. Luckily, this warning message is very common and easily fixed.

www.techarthub.com

I'm still working on a forest scene, getting up to speed with painting in assets, and it's not that big at all at this point, 5 small sections of road maybe 150' long, and maybe 20 actors consisting of a surface texture and textures to support some rocks, stumps, 1 log, and some sticks. This is not a lot, and I am surprised I am getting this message.

*Yes I have been using 4k textures, should I go to 2k?
*Yes, many of the rocks and plants, I've loaded separate textures for each one. I'm looking at consolidating my textures, so all the rocks are basically using the same textures instead of 6 texture sets.

But I have a question about texture load. Is there an extra texture load if a texture is just sitting in a project of only if this textures are displayed in the project? I assume the latter.

Material Instances, does making a separate Instance based on the same master material for each set of textures a bad thing or should I just duplicate an instance or does it matter for instances from a texture streaming perspective? If you want to see an image of this road section take a look at my post 262.

Any suggestions would be appreciated about the best way to reduce the streaming load. Thanks!

 

[Renzatic]

But I have a question about texture load. Is there an extra texture load if a texture is just sitting in a project of only if this textures are displayed in the project? I assume the latter.

It's the latter. If it's sitting in your projects file folder unused, it's taking up harddrive space, and nothing more. It's only active in video memory if it's being drawn in your scene.

Material Instances, does making a separate Instance based on the same master material for each set of textures a bad thing or should I just duplicate an instance or does it matter for instances from a texture streaming perspective?

All instances are references of a source material, with only the original taking up memory. I'm still not 100% sure how far you can push a material instance relative to its source, but most of the changes I've seen shown in these various tutorials I've glanced through only concern color changes, texture scales, and other odds and ends, all of which add negligible memory costs.

Take your road for an example. You could have 500 individual road tiles in your scene, each with its own instance, and they'll use no more video memory than what the source material they're all instanced from uses. The only variable is the RGB map on each of your road tiles, but that only takes up mere bytes in memory.

Any suggestions would be appreciated about the best way to reduce the streaming load. Thanks!

You've yet to even come close to having to consider this, but the general rule of thumb is to use texture resolutions appropriate to the size of your objects, and to use a fairly limited amount of textured assets per scene.

If you look at some random complicated scene, you'd think they're having to use hundreds or thousands of separate objects to create, but in reality, it's usually just 20 or 30 objects cleverly placed.

...and remember, even budget GPUs have 4 to 6 GB of video ram to play with these days.

 

[Huntn]

It's the latter. If it's sitting in your projects file folder unused, it's taking up harddrive space, and nothing more. It's only active in video memory if it's being drawn in your scene.



All instances are references of a source material, with only the original taking up memory. I'm still not 100% sure how far you can push a material instance relative to its source, but most of the changes I've seen shown in these various tutorials I've glanced through only concern color changes, texture scales, and other odds and ends, all of which add negligible memory costs.

Take your road for an example. You could have 500 individual road tiles in your scene, each with its own instance, and they'll use no more video memory than what the source material they're all instanced from uses. The only variable is the RGB map on each of your road tiles, but that only takes up mere bytes in memory.



You've yet to even come close to having to consider this, but the general rule of thumb is to use texture resolutions appropriate to the size of your objects, and to use a fairly limited amount of textured assets per scene.

If you look at some random complicated scene, you'd think they're having to use hundreds or thousands of separate objects to create, but in reality, it's usually just 20 or 30 objects cleverly placed.

...and remember, even budget GPUs have 4 to 6 GB of video ram to play with these days.

Yet I am getting this message and textures are not being drawn in the scene. I’ll look and see about upping the settings.

 

[Renzatic]

Yet I am getting this message and textures are not being drawn in the scene. I’ll look and see about upping the settings.

Question is, what kinda GPU do you have?

 

[Huntn]

Question is, what kinda GPU do you have?

GeForce 2070 plus 16GB RAM. I’d have to check if I have 8 or 16 GB VRAM

 

[Renzatic]

GeForce 2070 plus 16GB RAM. I’d have to check if I have 8 or 16 GB VRAM

Yeah, you're solid on that front. You have a better GPU than me.

I guess just try to up your settings, though I didn't know UE had an artificial hard limit like that.

 

[Huntn]

Yeah, you're solid on that front. You have a better GPU than me.

I guess just try to up your settings, though I didn't know UE had an artificial hard limit like that.

I found the answer, you have to edit the unrealengine.ini file. Default is 1000, I set mine to 4000, I suppose that is MB.

I’ve been playing with scatter assets and for the groups of dead leaves I downloaded from Megascans, I’m finding they go down as a group and because of the size of this group, on uneven ground some of these leaves are either buried in the ground or floating above the ground, I need to find some leaves that go down individually…

 

[Renzatic]

I found the answer, you have to edit the unrealengine.ini file. Default is 1000, I set mine to 4000, I suppose that is MB.

I’ve been playing with scatter assets and for the groups of dead leaves I downloaded from Megascans, I’m finding they go down as a group and because of the size of this group, on uneven ground some of these leaves are either buried in the ground or floating above the ground, I need to find some leaves that go down individually…

You can do that easily yourself. Make a plane in Blender, take one of the leaf textures from the Megascan assets (make sure it's 4k, since you're gonna need some fine resolution for what you're about to do), apply your materials, then go into the UV editor, and scale down the UV so it covers a single leaf. Rinse and repeat, add some bumps on your plane, and bam! You now have a bunch of leaves that can now be scattered across a mesh, and will conform to your landscape.

 

[Huntn]

You can do that easily yourself. Make a plane in Blender, take one of the leaf textures from the Megascan assets (make sure it's 4k, since you're gonna need some fine resolution for what you're about to do), apply your materials, then go into the UV editor, and scale down the UV so it covers a single leaf. Rinse and repeat, add some bumps on your plane, and bam! You now have a bunch of leaves that can now be scattered across a mesh, and will conform to your landscape.

View attachment 10312

Just have to figure out how to do that. Don’t they need to be divided into separate meshes?

 

[Renzatic]

Just have to figure out how to do that. Don’t they need to be divided into separate meshes?

Yeah, for when you're scattering them in Unreal. For the sake of simplicity, you can just duplicate them inside the same mesh in Blender, then separate them after you're done.

 

[Eric]

Found on Reddit, just wow.

 

[Huntn]

Found on Reddit, just wow.

Yeah, WOW.