4.11 DFAO artifacts

Apparently there’s a huge DFAO discrepancy when I update my project to 4.11
This is an identical setup , using DFAO / LPV. The top picture is 4.10.2 . bottom is 4.11

Firstly I fully understand that it is standard for DFAO not to use non uniformly scale meshes , however , it seems to work fine in 4.10 .

Secondly . these are the cube meshes from engine. We’re only using these as placeholders. But still I’m curious of the causes.

Is there an implementation chagne that I’m not aware of causing this? i’ve tried searching through the changelog. Any help would be appreciated

Hi Frozenfire,

This has already been reported with UE-26783. It’s also already been resolved internally with 4.12 and shouldn’t pose an issue for the future release.

As with any Distance Field issue, it’s key to use the DFAO and Mesh Distance Field visualization options to troubleshoot any issues.

If you use the Mesh Distance Field View you should see that these meshes are showing a lower quality, even though they are set to 1.0 value by default (I would assume if you’ve not changed them). This will directly impact quality of DFAO and any other Distance Field features. For the moment, you can adjust the quality to be a slightly higher value, like 2 or 3 to compensate. This issue also only affected some assets when I had reported it, mostly simple shapes, but more complex objects appeared to be fine from what I could tell.

I hope this helps!

Tim

Thanks for response ,instead of using quality globally,

I’ve manage to resolved this ( albeit a little less ideal ) by increasing the object’s MeshDistanceField Resolution Scale . About 10.0 solves it.

Just curious , how much performance increase does upping the value does?

I can’t recall the cvar off hand, or if it was just something that was output to the log, but you you can see the texture atlas size for the volume textures. Sorry for the vagueness at the moment. Essentially it will just increase the amount of memory needed to copy the distance field into the texture atlas that stores the volume textures.

are they literally 10 times bigger if set to 10? (max value seems to be 100 )

Hi @Tim-Hobson

I just checked , this hasn’t been resolve in 4.12.5 I’m still seeing this on default engine cube.

Apparently on further research ,
This is the expected outcome when you resize the mesh NON-Uniformly (happens in 4.10 as well ) . But does not happen when you scale it uniformly ( in 4.10 as well ) . But in 4.11 onwards,.its happening on both uniform/nonuniform.

Maybe it has to do with the DistanceField not scaling at all.

The issues you’re describing here are completely different.

The non-uniform scaling is part of Distance Field’s limitations. This is well documented in the DFAO and DF Soft Shadows page.

The issue with the artifacts has been fixed in 4.13.

In general with regards to Distance Fields and scaling. Scaling to large sizes is not recommended as you’ll run into issues, especially with DFAO since it doesn’t scale to really large values like the size of the buildings in the image. This is all covered in the limitations pages between DFAO and DFSS.

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I understand the non uniform scaling part is a limitation.
However this is happening with uniform scaling too. Additionally this didn’t appear in 4.10. correct me if I’m wrong , the limitations wouldn’t have just started to apply in 4.11 onwards did it?

Still not the same issue you’re seeing.

The non-uniform scaling has always been a limitation.

The artifacts you’re seeing are specific to the meshes from the Modes panel. Never reproduced with anything other than those, which is what you mentioned you’re using that has those specific artifacts. This part has been resolved in 4.13.

This only affects this subset of meshes included with the engine.