UE5 Hints & Tips - Foliage and Trees

In this Unreal Engine 5 Hints & Tips tutorial, I'll show you various techniques to improve the performance, quality and general usefulness of foliage and trees in your landscape environments...
00:00 - Intro
00:20 - Tip #1 - Shadow Performance
03:20 - Tip #2 - Dithered LOD Transitions
07:42 - Tip #3 - Tree Collisions
18:51 - Tip #4 - Fog Is Your Friend
26:01 - Tip #5 - Free Assets

[@sephtv2759]

If you still want to keep Virtual Shadow Maps, in a foliage heavy scene, you can use - r.Shadow.Virtual.NonNanite.IncludeInCoarsePages 0 as a console command to get a decent chunk of the fps back. r.Shadow.Virtual.Cache.MaxMaterialPositionInvalidationRange also helps a lot although it might introduce some small artifacting and smearing, I usually set that to 1000, the performance gain is a fair trade off to me at least.

[@eineatombombe]

What's the difference between virtual and not?

[@sephtv2759]

@@eineatombombe Virtual Shadow Maps are essentialy a higher resolution version of the normal shadow maps, allowing you to capture more fine shadows in the detail of your mesh if you're using high detail meshes with nanite. It also allows you to do soft penumbra shadows. All in all it's a more realistic approach but more taxing.

[@eineatombombe]

@@sephtv2759 thanks!

[@Fafhrd42]

Unfortunately looks like MaxMaterialPositionInvalidationRange was removed in UE 5.3 (as far as I can tell it was removed in favour of the WPO Disable Distance).

[@tacticalsapper]

Beats me why you do not have much more views and likes. Whenever you publish something I expect to be amazed by something you figured out so simple and yet so powerful to improve our own developments tremendously and you never disappoint. Very calm, very precise, very to the point and very helpful 10/10.

[@Mohab016]

You have no idea how greatful I am, THANK YOU SO MUCH, it's just creazy how much performance diff I got after these tips

[@CostaGeo6683]

This….just this, will save my stress levels!! My GTX 1060 has been struggling to make anything so thank you 🙏🏻

[@mjesensky2760]

Great tutorial, thank you very much!

[@SanOcelotl]

thanks, that second tip is what i needed

[@dedeeclaireclair4099]

Great tutorials, thank you a lot for you great work!

[@et1965]

Great video, thank you!

[@kickinit333]

Great tutorial. I can use these tips right away. I build static outdoor scenes and fly-above landscapes and I've struggled to deal with distant landscapes that could extend for 100 km. I usually build some tall mountains but the fog trick will really help me sell it. Cheers.

[@unrealitybites763]

Glad that you've been able to put these tips to good use. Exponential Height Fog is really useful... just adding a little in the distance really helps to sell the depth of a landscape.

[@arashtehrani7726]

this is very useful tutorial...thank you , keep going

[@FreakZado]

Love your videos man

[@CostaGeo6683]

Please make more of these for us amateurs 💚💚

[@RD_-ho5nx]

yo dither saving lives

[@unrealitybites763]

LOL. It works pretty well as long as there aren't any dramatic changes between LOD levels. Then, you see an unpleasant pixelation effect.

[@omarleyvaofficial]

Thank you

[@athan6385]

Very helpfull, thanks. Is there a way to get rid of that shadow flickering on folliage?

[@astralstormgamestudios1259]

Is there lod smooth setting for the trees also or just the grass? (Dithering lod)

[@gabehenry9404]

I would love a tutorial on how to add collision but still keep the trees as a grass variety. Either that or i just go the full procedural tree spawner route i guess. I wanted to avoid having trees spawn in the wrong areas. I just want them to spawn where the grass spawns, but have collision.

[@julienb2764]

Thank you for this video. Unfortunatly if I may, disabling virtual shadow map will also disabling nanite so that's not really a good tip.

[@srod8509]

First Question: If I have a terrain made from Maya, can I use it as a Terrain in UE5? Second Question: Can I spawn a cube mesh for every quad on that terrain; so every cube is edge to edge next to each other on the terrain? Thank you for making this video.

[@astralstormgamestudios1259]

hi ! the issue I have is with kikuyu grass from megascan...Quixel... There LOD 0 then nothing and then billboard...can you try the procedural tool and see if you get the same results?

[@Disastorm]

Is this using world partition? I can't get the target grass layer painter to work at all using the default Open World level. *edit nevermind it looks like changing the material on the main landscape doesnt change it for all the proxys, so I had to do that.

[@technicalhariom1291]

Can u create a tutorial on reactive water that is the reaction of water when an object or character enters in it

[@bronze497]

I have a question, when I put my foliage down using the foliage tool I put trees down and the whole tree is being affected by the wind and not just the branches

[@TinShackVideos]

What GPU are you using?

[@wolfigans8376]

since now we have nanite foliage. is dithered LOD a concern anymore?

[@lennygordon1848]

I am having one heck of a time getting folliage to show up at all in the open world maps. Is there an change you might do a tutorial on getting this scene setup from the ground up?

[@unrealitybites763]

I'll have a look at that. What specific problems are you having?

[@lennygordon1848]

@@unrealitybites763 Oh I actually just got some answeres last night. 1 - I needed to add LODs to my grass. 2 - I needed to crank this up "foliage.MaxTrianglesToRender"

[@Jimrimm]

how do you have more than 10 fps with the grass on your map ??

[@MagicMan12]

omgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomgomg u help me so much thankyouthankyouthankyou my performance was trash and now its not thank you so much it was the freaking virtual shadow maps

[@666nevermore]

Man i have a very big issue im unable to solve. I have an IMMENSE landscape, and my landscape material is very well set up. I can handle all kinds of foliage exept trees. Trees are very important for my view, i really want to see trees in the very far parts of the landscape since they do quite a huge chunk of volume of the landscape, i cant really use the treshold. I dont really care about collision since it's only cinematic purpose. The problem is that if i use landscape grass types with a high treshold it WILL NEVER NEVER populate the whole landscape with trees ( it's 10x10km ). And also my other limit is that i calculated the map of these woodslands (where the trees should spawn) and i really want to use this map since it's quite accurate. How the hell am i going to spawn trees all around the landscape following my map? thank you in advance man if you have suggestions i will appreciate them all

[@frankcastle2309]

foliage collision dont affect nav mesh btw

[@yongbinren8810]

Why not using UE5.1 to test VSM performance for grass and foliage?

[@unrealitybites763]

UE5.1 wasn't out when I made this video (and is still a development branch at the time of writing). Rest assured, once it comes out, I will test foliage performance and put out an updated video. I am excited about the claims for foliage performance in 5.1 and will test them out once it's officially released.

[@Galimah]

are these 2d trees?

[@jeffclark9765]

Shoot, I wanna know how he got that grass down!

[@nathaniel8422]

whats the point to waste all resources on grass, when its not even start of the game.