First off-- I am fairly new to UE4. I am using it for cinematic purposes (not game).
I have tried painting a large amount of grass and trees on a landscape (using the Kite Demo grass/trees as well as some other models). My issue is that the grass/trees very noticeably fade out (grass) and/or change LOD models.
I turned off the Mip Gen on the grass texture and the grass no longer disappears, but I am concerned that I am going about solving this issue the wrong way.
Any tips/suggestions/answers would greatly be appreciated. Thanks!
I have tried all sorts of combos of those. Unfortunately it seems to have more to do with the textures. As I mentioned, changing the mip gen settings seems to fix the disappearing (whereas messing with the LOD screen space does not), but I’m not sure if this is the right way. I would assume it is an issue with either LODs or culling, but everything I have tried outside of the mip gen settings seems to have no effect on the disappearing.
We ended up doing custom alpha fading (tempAA dither) in the materials that was based on the LOD distance we used in the demo. Unfortunately those numbers sometimes rely on hand matching to be correct. Also in some cases the meshes would need to be re-thought and have a better LOD3 in order to draw in extreme distances.
Try removing anything you see that multiplies alpha by TemporalDitherAA. You can just make it a multiply by 1 to remove all that stuff.
FWIW, generally grass needs a billboard similar to a tree billboard in order to render out really far. We had our grass set up that way at one point but the final version ended up being more tweaked for up close views and it could definitely be better in terms of distance drawing.
It’s very noticeable. Whenever I see it happen in a modern game, or indie title I smile, “it’s an unreal game.” A quick check confirms it. Would be great for an update to get this sorted out! A simple ui slider for the foliage tools would be amazing. Peace be with you!
