Let's Build the RPG! - 10 - How to Improve Foliage Performance in Unreal Engine 5

In this episode we cover every trick I've got for improving foliage performance while preserving the quality and the look and feel of your scene. In the final 10 minutes we focus on the common aesthetic issues you'll see with your foliage assets and how to fix them. Link to spreadsheet of all meshes and materials used so far in this series (as of episode 10): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xQquI9U5y4LbZ8mfdyMGEQRvv_RisNY5 00:00 Intro 00:15 Today's Goals and Key Concepts 02:21 Baseline FPS – 80 FPS 02:47 How to get the assets used this episode for free 03:08 Painting dense foliage along the edge of a river 05:19 Current FPS Assessment: 67 FPS 05:30 Painting the water quadrant with foliage (next quadrant of our garden level) 07:00 Current FPS Assessment: 35 FPS (low point) 07:37 Foliage PERFORMANCE Improvement Technique 1: Scaling up foliage assets and scaling down paint density 09:20 Current FPS Assessment: 50 FPS (15 FPS improvement) 09:52 Foliage PERFORMANCE Improvement Technique 2: Cull Distances 14:13 Current FPS Assessment: 59 FPS (9 FPS improvement) 15:19 Overview of LOD (Level of Detail) 16:29 Billboard Material (final LOD) 17:02 Contrasting lower and higher density (poly count- triangles and vertices) static meshes 18:09 Foliage PERFORMANCE Improvement Technique 3: Upping the minimum LOD 19:15 Foliage PERFORMANCE Improvement Technique 4: Cutting the total # of high poly assets in the scene compared to lower poly assets 20:16 Current FPS Assessment: 69 FPS (10 FPS improvement) 20:47 Scaling up size and painting fewer red fountain grass assets in garden water quadrant 23:36 Foliage AESTHETIC Issue fix 1: Adjusting the camera size threshold for the switch to the Billboard material 26:54 Foliage AESTHETIC issue fix 2: Brightness (color) change of the billboard material 27:38 Painting edges of garden water quadrant 29:04 Foliage AESTHETIC issue fix 3: Brightness (color) of the asset doesn't match the rest of the assets in the scene 30:05 Foliage AESTHETIC issue fix 4: Foliage growing in the wrong direction (align to normal) 30:53 Finishing up painting and aesthetic fixes for edges of garden water quadrant 32:14 Final FPS and quality test 32:38 Foliage AESTHETIC issue fix 5: Foliage wind settings 33:59 Foliage AESTHETIC issue fix 6: Rebuilding LOD's (fixing foliage LOD glitches) 35:21 Summary Slide: Techniques for Improving Foliage Performance 35:33 Summary Slide: Techniques for Improving Foliage Aesthetics 35:37 Conclusion and preview of next episode New episode released every Saturday morning! Direct References Fixing 'Texture Streaming Pool Over Budget' error: https://www.techarthub.com/fixing-texture-streaming-pool-over-budget-in-ue4/ How Instanced Heirarchical Meshes work: https://www.undeaddev.com/lets-play-with-a-lot-of-meshes-part-1 General References Quixel Bridge: https://quixel.com/bridge (comes automatically with UE5) Megascans: https://quixel.com/megascans What's the relationship between Quixel Bridge and Megascans? Bridge is basically the tool for bringing it into UE5, Megascans is the library. Official documentation on Foliage: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/BuildingWorlds/Foliage/ Official documentation on performance: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/TestingAndOptimization/PerformanceAndProfiling/ We will continue to cover performance in many episodes. The implications of performance (and the goal of improving performance without sacrificing the quality of the experience) is universal across many aspects of a game. Official documentation on LOD's: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/WorkingWithContent/Types/StaticMeshes/HowTo/LODs/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/WorkingWithContent/Types/StaticMeshes/HowTo/AutomaticLODGeneration/ Music used this episode: California – MusicbyAden Horizons – Roa Bubble – KV Desire – MusicbyAden Roa – Remember Playa – Mauro Somm Amelia – Amine Maxwell This Feeling – Atch Stable – KV Pineapple – JayJen We've Got Time – LiQWYD Ardent – Pratzapp Journey – Atch Sunray valley – Scandinavianz Ready for Summer - Roa