alternatives to trees outside of lightmass/playable area

[gerasimimumu]

Hi all,

I have a forest-y level, and I want to place some of these speed trees in the non-playable BG. Unfortunately, the ones I am using IN the playable area are too heavy to populate the BG areas.

Can someone suggest some alternatives, besides cards. I want some semi decent results and shadows. Unless someone can convince me that cards are the way to go, I would like to stay away from those.

Thanks,
Gera

[BloodReyvyn]

There are some options in the SpeedTree Actors' properties you should check out.



Lod Level Overrride mainly.

This will allow you to use the very same SpeedTrees, but force them to always render at lower LODs (and thus animated, lower-poly versions of the same trees so they will blend well). As you can see in this one, I set it to 0.1 (The range is between 0 and 1, though if you set to to -1 it will handle LODs normally).

If you want to use the billboards as well for very distant trees, just un-tick all of the boxes except for "Use Billboards" and mess with the settings to make sure that they will always render unless culled or occluded.

This makes for less assets needed to be loaded into memory, but you should still retain full-on shadows for the full-size SpeedTree Actors.

[gerasimimumu]

Thanks, I will mess with that and let you know if it worked out.

Gera

[gerasimimumu]

Well, it works in the editor, but I am having a problem. Even though these BG trees are set up to be billboards, in the primitive stats browser they are counted as the full tri count meshes. They boosted my scene tri count quite a lot. Lightmass will not run anymore, I keep getting out of memory error and it fails to build lighting.

Thoughts? Comments?

Thx,
Gera

[gerasimimumu]

I was kind of worried about mentioning this fact, but now I looked at DM_sanctuary and feel at ease.

I have about 130-135k of original GEO and almost 700k of instanced GEO (sanctuary has ~1.3 mil original, ~2.7 mil instanced). Still, when running lighting, my build fails. Without a doubt, their machines are beasts that can handle things our little 'at-home tinker toys' can't even dream of.

So, my problem remains. Lightmass is a no go...