I downloaded a package from the marketplace (Photorealistic Landscape Pack 4 - Photorealistic Landscape Pack 4 in Environments - UE Marketplace) and using the provided map named “Photorealistic_Plain_1” (apparently an ordinary landscape) I’m unable to enable the DFAO feature.
As already done successfully with other projects, I enabled the option “Generate Mesh Distance Fields” in the Project setting (under Rendering) and restarted the editor. When the map is re-opened, no “Building Mesh Distance Fields” message appears. Then, looking at the scene with the DFAO and Mesh Distance Field visualization options no “voxel” data are shown; only a slight darker version of the “lit visualization” is rendered.
Can you post a screen shot of the Distance Field AO visualization with the landscape?
Landscapes are different than other static meshes since they do not generate distance field meshes. Landscapes use a heightfield for AO data so it’s not surprising you don’t see the “building mesh distance fields”
As a comparison also have a few static meshes in the scene as well that have had their distance fields generated (use the mesh distance field visualization to see that this is in fact true).
Also make sure that you’ve got the Engine Scalability Settings set to EPIC otherwise Distance Fields will be disabled since they are not supported on lower quality settings than EPIC.
after having added one static mesh to the scene, the “Distance Field Ambient Occlusion” visualization started working! In attachment you can find the visualization before (image 1) and after (image 2) having added the static mesh. Thanks for the workaround!
Maybe it’s a known limitation, or it’s a related problem, but I noticed that even though the landscape uses the “grass tool” to spawn static meshes (e.g. the rocks), they are not taken into account by the “Mesh Distance Fields” visualization mode (see image 3).
