Flickering meshes (Modular Floor: Large Plane - 2 tris) (Updated: Now has video)

[louis]

I can't figure this out or find the answer for it, hopefully someone knows off the top of their head because it's driving me insane.

I am working on a level that is scaled up so the player feels small. It's pretty basic, I'm just practicing some additional things in the process. For the floor I'm using a single plane with a Diffuse/Spec material. The floor is made up of around 60 or so of these tile meshes (just so I can spin them around and whatnot). Just to give an idea of size: each floor tile is 16384x16384. The meshes aren't scaled inside UDK, they were made the large size before they were exported out and imported into UDK.

The problem is that they flicker randomly when I I'm zoomed out (or from the player viewpoint since he is way above the floor). It looks as if the meshes would if they were overlapping, but they are perfect power of two squares that snap to the grid perfectly.

I tried pulling in the UVs a bit from the edge in case there were any weird lighting problems that were causing the issue.

Does anyone know why the flickering is happening? Does it have something to do with the meshes only being a 2 tri plane? Is it because of the mesh size? What can I do to try and fix it? If nothing else I'll just make one large plane for the floor, but I want to know what is going on if possible.

Thanks,

Louis

Now with video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CucZ51Tl5sg

[ambershee]

Post a quick vid on youtube - there's a few things this could be and it really helps people to see it.

[louis]

Here is the video. Sorry there isn't any sound, I don't have a microphone handy. I start the video with the camera near ground level, then when I move up toward the pedestal (where the player will mainly be) you can see the meshes begin to flicker (about 27 seconds in). I don't know if its because everything is gigantic there is some sort of camera distance/clipping problem. When I get near it again the problem doesn't seem to present itself. To get a better feel for scale keep in mind that most of playable area will be on the pedestal and inside the hourglass on it.

[ambershee]

If the game area is played on the pedestal, why not just use a brush instead of the mesh?

It looks like your meshes are getting occlusion culled, which suggests a bounds problem.

[louis]

Well, I was using a mesh because I wasn't sure if I was going to want to do anything special with the tiles yet. I mean, I could go and replace them with a brush or a large mesh, but since I spent so much time trying to figure out why its happening I wanted to see if anyone knew one way or the other. It shouldn't matter that the meshes are snapped next to each other as long as they aren't going into each other, shouldn't it?

Here is in game doing the same thing as well:

[ambershee]

Like I said, I suspect it's a bounds issue. You can take a look at the bounds in the static mesh editor; if they don't encapsulate the object ,you're going to have problems. I suspect you can remedy that by quickly giving the mesh default collision.