🌿 Ultimate FOLIAGE Guide in UE5 🌿

I'm very happy to share this guide with all of you today. I spent DAYS trying out every method and technique I could find on Foliage in Unreal Engine 5.
I start from the basics for the beginners, but also for ex-Unity devs. I then go over most well-known optimizations for foliage before showing you some very nice tips & tricks that I had trouble finding myself.
This guide is not a complete course, as it would take literal hours to teach you every single detail, but this is probably one of the most condensed and straight-to-the-point resource you'll find.
Of course I may have missed a few important notes, as always please share your own research and findings with others down below so we can all grow as a community. I am not an expert myself and am always looking for new ways to improve.
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RESOURCES
Auto landscape material tutorial (Unreal Sensei) - • Unreal Engine Landscap...
Free auto landscape material download link (Unreal Sensei) - www.unrealsensei.com/asset/au...
M4 Magic Map Material & Maker (Marketplace) - www.unrealengine.com/marketpl...
Detailed info on Shadow Cache Invalidation Behavior (SabreDartStudios) - • Unreal Engine 5.3 Prev...
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TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - Intro
00:50 - Quixel Bridge
01:12 - Megascans folders
01:26 - the Foliage folder
02:04 - Foliage Mode
02:35 - Nanite
04:30 - LODs settings
05:35 - Culling
06:16 - Texture optimizations
07:06 - Virtual Textures (VTs)
08:24 - Shadow Cache tip
09:03 - Fundamentals & Landscape material
10:06 - Landscape Grass Type
11:14 - Procedural Foliage Spawner
11:57 - Procedural Foliage Blocking Volume
12:21 - Ray Tracing & Nanite fix
#UE5 #3d #unrealengine

[@OverJumpRally]

8:10 Don't do that!! MegaScans come with a Master Material that's already set up with VT sample textures! It's in the folder underneath the basic Master Material!

[@VLRN_]

Oh I missed that, thank you

[@ConradSly]

If you want to use nanite for foliage, the performance is greatly increased without using alpha textures. You will have better performance if your foliage is pure geometry (to some extent, you can't go super crazy with the vert count on individual clumps of grass). So take care to cut your nanite mesh out around your alpha texture. This is simply because overdraw from alpha testing is still one of the most costly things to render, so increasing your vert count with nanite levels is extremely heavy. There is also nanite overdraw to consider, which has to do with overlapping geometry. Take special care to optimize your geometry placement to reduce nanite overdraw, and make your materials for nanite foliage Opaque Subsurface to decrease their shading cost and have no regular alpha testing overdraw on any of it :) If you want to learn more about that check out Paul Mader's technical breakdown of nanite foliage for Fortnite.

[@oskarwallin8715]

Do you have any link for that Tech breakdown? i've tried searching for it, but no success

[@ConradSly]

@@oskarwallin8715 also if you have any questions about it feel free to ask, I personally made about 50% of foliage assets seen in Fortnite for the past several years :)

[@semirukiya5308]

Hi, could You provide a link or the specific name of what should be searched to reach that breakdown? Cheers!

[@Lukasz_Stan]

This are golden guides! Thanks a lot 💪

[@mebessusn]

This was an extremely helpful video, thank you so much for the optimization tips!

[@jayhop960]

thank you for putting this out man i appreciate it thank you

[@otherknights]

Thank you for sharing experience 🙏🏻✨

[@danielbecerra6094]

Another very well explained video

[@juliotorres64]

OMG thanks a lot i always thought my PC wasnt powerful and now with this i realized that was rendering with a huge texture quality. Thank you again for the optimizations tips.

[@larrybarnes1241]

This was incredible and helped me solve my foliage disappearing problem! Thanks!

[@tomjumper3937]

thanks dude this helps a lot !

[@saeedzamani1503]

Thanks that was great!

[@CAD_gaming]

Thanks this is gonna help a lot with my game.

[@tomahawk81]

Great and useful information! Many Thansk! You got a new follower.

[@YahiyaJasem]

Great video sir

[@lesterzamora8671]

This is great, well done. I love reviewing your optimization on foliage-landscape. May I suggest you revisit the latest IA scatter plugin and DASH plugin (previously graphN) and would suggest you do optimization based on the plugins for scattering? I love using IAscatter in conjunction with my procedural levels as it easy to use, including blueprint actors. Though dash is subscription its the fastest way and easiest way to scatter and dress the environment. PCG for me is still time consuming to setup unless more asset creators make more templates out of it or the examples from UE. So currently i mix dash and IA scatter. Can you also cover HISM or packed level actors type optimization? Thank you so much

[@Spot120]

thanks a lot.

[@_XAIR_]

Good job thx

[@0rdyin]

I was having the same lod isuses with non - nanite grass... Thanks man..!

[@CodeJourney557]

"Un pti verre d'eau" tu as refait ma soirée mdrrr

[@The.Anime.Library]

great

[@ahmedshakib3883]

I really like the landscape material , did you make it or was it bought online .

[@VLRN_]

It’s Magic Map Material & Maker (M4), on the UE marketplace

[@DecentEsthetE]

Can i procedural generate trees with using some masks and have collision?

[@teuspolito]

Is it possible to apply foliage to a skeletal mesh?

[@siddharthpaul6539]

how to use this material in my project what i have to copy?

[@serizawareda7831]

Salut, merci pour le tuto ! tu as un discord pour échanger entre passionnés sur unreal, les techniques etc ? je cherche à discuter avec des gens, apprendre d'eux, leur apprendre enfin je pense que tu as compris ! lol

[@bolbolegypttuber]

I know way to make LOD 0 by copy and past .. how to explain it here .. do you have anyway out of KZbin ?

[@NMY03]

I always get the following message in the editor "video memory has been exhausted". The performance tanks very hard. I currentyl have an RTX3070. Any advice?

[@VLRN_]

You can watch my video on optimization and texture streaming pool, I cover some techniques you can use to make your scene lighter (texture size reduction for example). I’d also look at the models you are using to scatter, if they are megascans you should swap them for less detailed meshes, and try anything that could make your scene lighter

[@kriros97]

I can't paint foliage.. do you know why?

[@thedefaultcube1218]

bought M4 after you bragged about it,... cant seem to get the grass types to sapwn with either unreal sensai landscape or the M4 addon. even in the default island example map no grass i dont know what im doing wrong

[@VLRN_]

With M4 you could just edit the existing grass types and switch meshes there, if you want to add new grass types it requires modifying the blueprints because it needs to connect to the landscape. Same for Unreal Sensei probably but it’s maybe shown in one of his guides. For a proper way to do it with M4 I’d ask on the discord, however I think you can already get far with just modifying the existing ones.

[@thedefaultcube1218]

@@VLRN_ thank you. Got it figured out. On grass landscape type I had the scaling turned on. Unchecked that box and foliage spawns as expected

[@real2rek]

So I totally shouldn't use nanite on grass/thin meshes? Isn't there other option?

[@VLRN_]

Well it depends of your project and goal, but as of right now I don’t think nanite is a good option for grass if you want good performance. Maybe it will be better in future versions. You should rather spend some time adjusting your LODs for grass if you are making games, you can find game-ready assets that you may not have to tweak too much. Also look at LOD plugins.

[@DarkSession6208]

@@VLRN_UE Community is gatekeeping something about Nanite and Foliage. Its not documented at all but some people know it and will only tell you if you ask specifically. For Rendering it does not matter... But if you want to use nanite on Foliage like Trees and Grass IN A GAME (!!!) theres no way around than fully modeling out the models, because performance will tank into oblivion, if you do it properly you get more frames than with normal meshes. So in short : Model Tree / Grass models by hand, don't overdo the Polys (250-400 for a grass mesh is okay). The Leaves or grass halms SHOULD NOT HAVE any Alpha map, no transparency! Only use solid polys and model it like you would model a object such as a car or weapon, don't do anything with translucency. Solid blocks. This is to prevent overdraw, nanite is absolutely dying with overdraw and 95% of the assets in the store (paid or free) are outdated ones which were created with Opacity masks instead of being fully modeled out. So basically if you want full performance you have to do it yourself or buy assets which have no opacity mask. If you want to do it yourself use Speedtree and stamp out the alpha so only the actual part of the leave is selected and nothing around it (so only parts of the leave are part of the model and no empty 2D Plane). Benefits : more performance than using conventional meshes that had used opacity masks + LOD is a thing of the past. Nanite with this method gains a lot more performance than the old fashioned optimized way before nanite was even a thing.

[@M_A_A2301]

Great Tutorial, big thanks ! but the challenge also, is to make a good foliage with path-Tracing, and believe me, it's quite annoying !!

[@VLRN_]

I feel you, I haven’t used the path tracer in a while actually but everything about it feels a bit experimental. I couldn’t get the foliage wind working on a projet recently and switched to Lumen instead

[@M_A_A2301]

@@VLRN_ yeah for the foliage wind, it's a big mess, until i found this tutorial kzbin.info/www/bejne/d6OWp6mvnM6lgrcsi=aMx6qoLIf-Len80Q it help's me but, the performance drop down when rendering, but the result is there

[@PretendCoding]

Are you trying to make that for virtual production or something? The path tracer gives you "ground truth." If you want good looking grass in the path tracer, you should probably learn how to use the new Substrate system. Barring that, look up Ben Cloward here.

[@M_A_A2301]

@@PretendCoding I will, thank you :)

[@spektra_exe]

Tu peut parler français on ta griller

[@unrea13st]

Dude wtf please why the f*** do you have to torture us with that backgroudn music?