Any Unreal Engine Experts Here?

[Huntn]

The one big advantage Unreal has for non-coders (like me) is the Blueprint visual scripting setup. Rather than dealing with the seemingly arcane syntax and structuring of C++, you just have to wrap your head around a bunch of premade logic blocks strung together in a nodal system.

For what Huntn's planning, which is a single environment with some interactive bits and bobs strewn about, it won't take him long to come to terms with things.

Yeah, except I keep running into issues. There is so much I don’t know. In the project I’m in , turning on Nanite in the landscape, turns the landscape black. Ok that’s ok, because I last read that Nanite in Unreal landscape materials has some issues, so I turned it off and landscape comes back immediately. this is different than Nanite for Static Meshes…I think.

Then on my landscape with Static Mesh assets sitting on the landscape, I can’t get Virtual Textures (technically Runtime Virtual Textures) working although I just went though a tutorial on it, in fact several, where I build the components from scratch and they work there, but when I pull in the same landscape material that I was using in the tutorial, into my heightmap, it seems to work fine as an auto material, yet, here I can’t get the virtual texturing to work on static mesh assets brought into the landscape. Frustrating. Today when I sit down to work, I have a Trouble Shooting Runtime Virtual Texture video ready to watch.

Runtime virtual texturing: When you place a rock on the landscape, the landscape has its materials/ textures, and the rock has it’s own set of material/textures. RVT enables the landscape material to be projected and blended along the bottom of the rock’s static mesh so it looks like a more realistic part of the landscape.

Another aspect I’m facing is that as someone who is aging, my short term memory is challenged. I’m highly reliant on taking lots of notes and using them for reference later. The good thing is when I watch a video where a teacher is manipulating a material or a landscape,, it looks familiar.

 

[Huntn]

Unreal Engine needs a good kick in the butt. Yesterday I closed down my project when the Super Bowl came on (Yay Chiefs!) and RVT was not working. This morning when I started the project, the boulder that was sitting on the ground that I was cursing yesterday, today upon start has a Virtual Texture applied. I almost spit out some coffee! Bastardo!! So I don't know...but it's working until it decides to stop working I guess...

 

[Renzatic]

Ok that’s ok, because I last read that Nanite in Unreal landscape materials has some issues, so I turned it off and landscape comes back immediately. this is different than Nanite for Static Meshes…I think.

If I had to take a guess as to why, it'd be because you're using your vertices to paint your RGB textures on, and Nanite adds and subtracts vertices depending on their distance from the camera. Your material doesn't know what's what, and just gives up, defaulting to black.

 

[Huntn]

If I had to take a guess as to why, it'd be because you're using your vertices to paint your RGB textures on, and Nanite adds and subtracts vertices depending on their distance from the camera. Your material doesn't know what's what, and just gives up, defaulting to black.

I just don’t know. I am painting blended layers and the way that works when you apply a new landscape material to the landscape, it turns black until you assign layer data then when you paint the first color it will change to whatever you paint, sometimes the entire landscape will paint with that first color, This is pretty standard, so I don’t see why Nanite would object to that. I also searched online for an answer and really saw nothing that confirmed what I’m seeing. What I need is a good reference that tells me all the things that Nanite might object to.

 

[Huntn]

OK, I seem to have gotten though my Runtime Virtual Texture crisis, tomorrow I'll configure another rock and some trees, then I'll be convinced I'm beyond the issue . I found my big Oak trophy tree in a project at Epic that was inexpensive. Playing around with a practice run of applying some instanced Aspen Trees. In game, all the leaves are waving.

This is just one tree, rotated and scaled to different sizes. When I start applying them for real there will probably7-10 different trees, but you can see what rotation and scaling does to make it look a bit different.

 

[Huntn]

I'm getting to a point in my landscape project where I want to work on a stream going through my woods, so I found this UE4 tutorial, it starts basic and although it is somewhat of a repeat at the beginning, but he will move into water and it seems I'm always learning something new.
Ben Cloward- Building Worlds Series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL78XDi0TS4lHwqv_PmXAdedT2SH1qeRqK

Now this was done in UE4 and UE5 handles LODs (how detail is removed from models as camera distance from an asset becomes greater, but I increased the density of the landscape close up and I'm seeing more smoother detail, and virtually no drop in FPS when looking at it in runtime.