Virtual Textures Are Now My Favorite Thing

[@FishMan1nsk]

What?! VT's are not streaming only resolution that you need right now. The engine is doing this basically for any texture, which is why we need mip maps. With VT's it is streaming small portions of the textures like 100x100 pixels directly from hard drive. So at the end you can stream textures with any size and use the texture memory far more efficient. However the drawback is that this method of streaming is extremely expensive and any texture sample with VT will add like 100 instructions into your shader. So at the end the most basic shader for props will be like 400-500 instructions and layered materials will be like 1500-2000 instructions... So VTs doesnt help with perfomance they help with memory. And Im not talking about RVT's right now. At least in shader complexity RVT's looks cheaper, but what are the real perfomance implications - I just do not know. They SHOULD imporve perfomance, but I never tested this for sure.

[@shannenmr]

The above is the correct information, not what is at the start of this video. Also check out Ben Cloward's YT videos on Landscape Textures and RVT's along with UNDINI's YT videos on landscape textures.

[@OverJumpRally]

0:34 You are describing Mipmaps, not VT! VT split the texture around a mesh and they show only the part of the mesh that's visible. So, for example, if a cube is wrapped by just one 8k texture but only two faces are available, the VT would only load up part of the texture that correspond to those visible faces. In my racing game, for example, I had to disable VT on my car because it took a moment to update when I was showing the side of the car. Or when I switched the camera to hood, that part of the texture would looked blurred for a moment.

[@mindped]

anyway to not have these blurry spots on the ground? I tried runtime virtual textures on a peice of ground and i see blur whenever i turn the camera for a second

[@Joshua-lk9sg]

Mipmaps are how the GPU chooses between different resolution copies of a texture to prevent issues with noise resulting from under-sampling a texture, however what was being discussed *is* a part of virtual textures, where different levels of detail of the texture (usually represented as lower mip levels) are streamed in from the drive resulting in the lower detail mip levels containing the full detail listed in the texture. As higher levels of detail are required those versions of the texture are loaded in from the drive and smoothly interpolated into the highest detail mipmap. This is what causes the signature look of Unreal 4 games where a scene loads and everything is muddy and over the next couple seconds the textures clean up. So you are right that mipmaps are *connected* with this, this is *also* about virtual textures which are required for streaming textures at different levels of detail based on visible detail on the screen from your drive.

[@mindped]

@@Joshua-lk9sgfor anyone who stumbles on this topic… I fixed RVT blur by adding the following to my projects DefaultEngine.ini default pool size is usually 64… i just upped the value… to 512 [/Script/Engine.VirtualTexturePoolConfig] +Pools=(SizeInMegabyte=512, bAllowSizeScale=False, bEnableResidencyMipMapBias=True)

[@mezozoltan1]

I really hope that you'll be able to optimise the game to run at a high enough fps because so far the stuff you've done for the game is amazing and beautiful. Your ideas and ambition towards this project are really outstanding.

[@BoroCG]

Thank you, and I hope so!

[@DarkSession6208]

@@BoroCGHi, i did not watch your other videos just stumbled upon this video. When using nanite, make sure you have no Opacity masks in the Tree or Foliage model. You NEED to have a fully modeled out models and no leafcards. If you have any 2D Textures with cut out alpha around them this will bring nanite to its knees. A 8000 Poly tree with Alpha (the old fashioned way) is as performant as a 8.000.000 Poly tree with Nanite. But a 8000 Poly tree with Alpha and nanite enabled will tank your frames more than both TOGETHER. Thats the reason why most Trees/Foliage with Nanite have low perfromance when you turn it on and better without nanite. 95% of the assets in the unreal store have Alpha masks on them, so they are not usable with Nanite. The recently Maple Pack from Megascans trees is different, they fully modeled it out this time, Optimized Grass pack can also be used with Nanite. You can see if your stuff has a Alpha map instead of normal polys by using the Overdraw view or wireframe. Look at this : imgur.com/a/TudjKBk Both Top images is the Megascan Tree which is fully modeled out, it has individual leaves and nothing around it. The bottom picture shows you that there are big leaf cards (2 sided polygons which look like they are flat) and then theres a alpha map around them so whats around the leaves gets cut out. If you go to wireframe view you will see those leaf cards because they are still part of the model. And like i said 95% of content on the Store (especially if its older than 6-8 months) has leaf cards instead of being fully modeled out. If you use speedtree its also with a alpha mask, you need to manually cut out the stuff around the leaves if you want to make it work in Unreal. Im bothering with this problem since 2 weeks. But when i found out that the leaf cards are the problem and most store assets are simply not usable for nanite i found and made those assets which work with it, and now i can have 200x 8.000.000 poly trees in super dense range with stable 60 FPS,if i add another 30 trees its still 60 FPS at WQHD. People need A) be aware that old modeling techniques are absolutely unusable for nanite, and B) that store items are useless now if you want to use them with nanite, also most stuff from 3D Trading sites, they are often made with speedtree and leafcards, like by 80%. You can get some old 10 year old models but make sure they are fully modeled out.

[@DRTHNihilus]

I'm also working on a game at the moment, these videos along with the countless tutorials I'm watching are really helping. Keep it up Boro, very excited to play this when it gets a public release

[@peterallely5417]

For the landscape material still repeating, you can do mip map tricks and macro texture distance blends that help with the repetition when the camera is far away

[@literallyjeff]

Have you seen Ben Cloward's landscape tutorials? Huge amount of info about how to prevent surface tiling and much more.

[@officialpaperplanesgame]

You can use a macro variation on top of the texture to give it more variance. Just adds darker and lighter spots more or less randomly. Adds to the tiling break up. You can also use the macro variation to blend 2 textures together and that will give a much better result for removing the tiling. Then use RVT and done. Runtime virtual texture "RVT" is the most important part!

[@VaunaKiller]

I like the ambient music, reminds me of STALKER bg. Eery and windy, good stuff :)

[@weelkeen]

Same Reminded me of Pathologic

[@3polygons]

And horror games have been steadily being successful on Twitch (and Steam), lots are streaming every horror indie game (I noticed a general big push there with indie games, lately...maybe it was so before, too).

[@ToddHillerich]

when i have been doing optimization in a live stream i had a viewer mention checking light complexity view shader view to help with adjusting lightmap resolution on foliage

[@ZephrusPrime]

A few years ago I said you should get into 3D-looks good on ya bro!

[@darkalleywaystudio3975]

Wait til 5.3 gets released. Nanite Landscapes, virtual shadow maps, and lumen improvements. Add this all together with your current project, guaranteed you will see improvements with optimization. I can't wait til 5.3 official release!

[@BoroCG]

Yeah it'll be interesting, also Nanite performance improvements for masked materials. Not sure if it'll be a huge difference though

[@tserj]

@@BoroCG how fast it's now in 5.3?

[@officialpaperplanesgame]

You can also increase the RVT pool to a bit higher. Every time you see the RVT streaming in you are out of pool memory for the RVT. Base is set to 64Mb. You can increase to get a balance of least texture memory without the pop in you see. Will have to be done through your Default.INI. Currently I am using 512Mb on a large open world and I lost all the pop in but I come close the the threshold with out going over.

[@boxtodragon]

Why can't i save this video to my playlist.

[@Nogardtist]

then what about stylized textures cause the hardest thing to find is then a wooden box floats in the middle of the ocean and the wetness reflects both light and environment colors at a specific angle

[@distructed1878]

I would be interested on what your resources for learning UE5 are. Are you just going through the documentation or are you using paid/free tutorials? Or maybe a private teacher? I think your progress is amazing at the rate you are pumping these videos out.

[@BoroCG]

Thanks! Just YT, it's all here

[@distructed1878]

@@BoroCG Makes sense, and its all free

[@Andy_Shust]

Where can I learn more about blending the stones with the landscape? Is it possible without runtime VTs? I'm very curious to learn this for my archviz work!

[@RiverFox_YT]

would you have any idea why i get around 85fps in my basic project, but then as soon as i enable virtual runtime textures, which is meant to improve performance, it then drops to around 25/30 fps?

[@xnicktendox7501]

Could you make a tutorial video on how to set up the virtual texture for meshes like the rocks as you have it set up in this video (12:00 into the video)?

[@infectioussneeze9099]

One good lesson i learned from blender guru, but it might be too late for you in your ue5 project is Guru often times restarts his projects from the start because at the very start of a project is when most people make the most errors and by working again from sratch from the scene you can avoid all of this earlier mess ups.

[@BoroCG]

Good point, not really relevant here though. I actually restarted in a clean level since the previous episode, to get rid of the broken world partition, haven't noticed any performance improvements

[@mendeleev_9H2PDsgXu7NmphCUEH]

I remember that you had problem vith VSM. try to disable or limit WPO by distance from camera on foliage, so not all virtual shadow pages will be updating every frame.

[@BoroCG]

Thanks, that's a good advice, but there's no WPO on anything right now, and before it was limited by distance, too. It would probably be a noticeable difference if not for the colossal hit from nanite :)

[@ignaciolopez7605]

Thanks for the contribution. Interesting; but an environment with a single texture seems very boring to me. To avoid tiling I prefer a system based on camera distance to mix resolutions; and the pixel depth and dithering to suppress the seams

[@JoshJay]

Can you blend two separate Nanite meshes or can you only blend Nanite meshes to landscapes? I’ve got some Cliff meshes that look great on their own but look kinda janky where they overlap. I’d love to make them blend if that’s possible

[@jackryan8588]

Hey, you actually can affect the landscapes via splines.

[@jamesbrady1930]

can I add to a custom full rock model for example? and it will blend from the bottom? or do I have to have a open bottom?

[@BoroCG]

You totally can, there's no requirement on the topology. It just fades into the landscape material at a certain distance from it

[@jamesbrady1930]

sweet good to know.@@BoroCG

[@jamesbrady1930]

got it work on the trees, but VT always ends up blurry for me. for both landscape textures that the object being applied too.

[@jamesbrady1930]

I noticed it doesn't like sheer sides such as 90 degrees.@@BoroCG

[@glenn3646]

Hi I have a problem with some texture when I import from Speed Tree , when I close Unreal and open it back some texture of the Speed Tree disappear and in the material slot where the texture suppose to be the "WorldGridMaterial" come instead, any solution?

[@Mr.-M-Studio]

is the forest going to be the only place the player can be or is there other levels as well ?

[@BoroCG]

The demo level is the forest. There will be some structures/buildings and bodies of water

[@noxabellus]

What is the size in memory of one of those landscape textures?

[@accretiongames]

Hello ! How did you get RVT to work with virtual textures? Since I updated all my textures to VT in my project, my RVT blending no longer works, I now have a blurry rendering for the blending part :( thanks !

[@nfarquhar]

Hey, it look like you have nearly 10ms of SW rasterization going on in the Nanite pass. this is usually when you need to use shader features like Opacity Masks (leaves) or world position offset (usually wind effects). if you don't need those features, you can disable them (detach the pin, dont just put a constant 0 parameter or anything) , and this will leave the rendering of that asset in the hardware Nanite pass which is astronomically faster. 0.09ms in your case. I have seen people use blueprints to enable advanced features based on proximity to the player, so if they are close to a tree it might swap the material for one that has subtle wind, then all the other trees outside that radius are static, and render super cheaply. But reducing the SW rasterization will help your performance a lot I think. There is a viewport Buffer for it maybe, so you can validate? but dont have UE open at the moment. Hope that helps

[@TheSxW]

0:00 - why i love virtual textures 10:40 - the most interesting part

[@pimeine]

Now I want to learn how to use the Virtual Textures 🤣 Is it possible to use the same process for World Partition landscape ? 👀

[@michaelsmith1503]

You see to have a different way of creating rvt blends, how did you create the height runtime texture? I’m curious, as that part wasn’t in yr video. Many thanks 🙏

[@michaelsmith1503]

As the engine updates every 6 months or so, you watch these tutorials and follow them and find out nodes have changed or no longer exist and ends up not looking the same…I don’t think Ive ever followed a YT video and ended up with the same result 😅

[@TheOddInfluencer]

I have a question, do you have a story for the game? I’ve been just thinking of so many possibilities. Like how the enemies are child themed. Does this mean it’s a growth taking over children? Is it just a style choice? Is it the offspring of a forgotten god? I must know!

[@T7011yt]

how do you improve the performance of PCG area? i´m trying to use PCG in 3.5 kilometers, but the game gets slow on load, and the editor crashes.

[@Geminiwoods42]

Do we need rvt now we have nanite landscape and vt textures

[@OverJumpRally]

Yes, they are separate things.

[@waffleman2212]

You can absolutely fix the tiling "repetitive" texture issue. :) Give a search on it. Fairly simple process.

[@BoroCG]

I know I know ) but that involves upscaling at a distance, other textures and big scale noises. I was talking about just using one texture

[@OMG3Dmax]

interesting, it was very informative, thanks for the video

[@JOEFRAUST]

I have Unreal Engine 5.3, and I don't see the option to convert to virtual texture. I think it's because they changed it to the name volume texture?

[@tserj]

have you enabled virtual texture support in project settings?

[@JOEFRAUST]

@@tserj I haven't tried thank you ☺️

[@phalhappy8612]

howt to do that on static mesh terrain? I prefer static mesh terrain and substrate material.

[@OverJumpRally]

You shouldn't use a static mesh terrain

[@phalhappy8612]

@@OverJumpRallyI prefer the ability to edit, UV, and texture in DCC software like Blender and Mari

[@stefanosalerno3823]

Hey man, nice videos, yore pretty technical, do you use unreal in the industry? What’s your job?

[@christaylor553]

Nanite is where ray tracing was when the nvidia 20 series came out years ago. Its the future but its bleeding technology right now.

[@quantumdeconstructor]

I think you are wrong about Virtual Textures (svt), but not 100% sure. I think SVT are actually WORSE for performance, since each VT sampler samples the texture 2 times. SVT is here to help with texture memory - it only loads parts of a texture that are currently on screen, and not a full texture, unlike regular textures. What you said in the begining ("loads a texture resolution depending on the distance"), is actually how MipMaps in regular textures work.

[@TechArtAlex]

Part of your issues with DLSS may come from depth of field. Here's a bit from the DLSS documentation: Incompatibilities with Depth of Field As DLSS workload occurs in the same spot as TAAU in the pipeline, visual differences in DoF are expected. To minimize the differences, it is recommended to use DLSS in 'Quality' or 'Ultra Quality' modes. It is possible to tweak the DoF settings in the camera actor to compensate for the differences. Please keep in mind this is content dependent. Thus for some scenes the differences can be minimal and avoided while in other cases it might be more challenging In other words, you will need to manually adjust the depth of field with DLSS on vs off to maintain a consistent image between them.

[@syntaxed2]

Well, without nanite the rendering would just brick to a crawl...I mean, you can try it in pure c++ code with 10 trees.

[@Zach-rw6jf]

I'm REALLY surprised they haven't gotten AI to take a small tile texture and generate randomized patterns of the same texture, then stitch them together in random orders to create a 100% completely unique landscape that doesn't repeat at all.

[@OverJumpRally]

It's called "texture bombing" and you don't need an AI to do that. There's also a version with hexagons.

[@tigerija]

Yeah, this nanite is a bit pain in the ass. :D Please post updated if you found some ways to improve nanite in general.

[@cristiangambadori220]

This kind of indie games don't really need nanite nor lumen because you will never be able to maintain the quality of realism across all asset and once finished it will look like an asset flip. It's also important to keep in mind that the average steam user according to the Steam hardware survey still runs 16 gb of RAM and an Nvidia 1650 and with these specs a game with those things activated will never work. The good news is that a videogame is not just graphics.

[@OverJumpRally]

@@cristiangambadori220 Wrong. You can find pretty much any high quality assets for your indie game. Also wrong about the survey. The 1650 is the most used card but that's not the average power. In fact, over 60% have at least a 2060 and that number is constantly climbing. By the time your game is done, people will have better hardware. Last but not least, people with more money buy more games. Guess what else people with more money buy? Better cards. So don't assume that a percentage means also a linear distribution on games bought.

[@adriank8792]

You could just not use Nanite. Sure it looks good, it's new and flashy but do you actually need millions of polygons for your horror game? Why import trees directly from the sapling addon without any changes, when you can specify the number of polygons before you export them, or even decimate them before exporting? I wonder if going with UE5 was a good idea in the first place. A lot of times you're hanging below 20 fps with constant stutters everywhere. Is it really worth it? I don't think so

[@GAMINGAPOSTLEJ]

awesome dude

[@bobdrakenzil4785]

It broke my POM materials

[@leanderdasilva1993]

John became Boro

[@3polygons]

So... UE's virtual textures are like LOD but for textures? Gosh, am liking this engine, to learn its art pipeline... But Unity is so massively requested in job offers in my area/region... I thought you were actually coding, but it seems to be all nodes based (like part of Blender and some compositing tools), that's cool. I guess you can code in UE, too, if you want (ie, for some details). I guess anyway might have to keep track of the global size of the game (the final compiled thing, ofc) in disk memory, for future download versions. But I guess that will be able to get balanced later, somehow. Indeed... as it won't be surely a game with gazillions of scenery and levels like other games, in comparison, it won't get much bigger than those, I suppose. Would it be any issue for the people's GPUs (ones having nvidia, others AMD or intel) to switch between DLSS and other scaling methods? I believe cards can emulate non native up-scaling (by software?) but I am a complete ignorant about it. :D I certainly not loved the "floating" blurry shapes with nvidia... But I did not like either some close ups I saw in the Spiderman's latest game, as shown by certain streamer. But this could be just my artist's bias, and maybe gamers don't care much... PD: No need to answer any of this, it's too much text. :D (can be seen as rhetorical questions :D )

[@MonsterJuiced]

That's interesting, why is Unity specifically requested by your clients? In my area is a bit of a mix but I'm one of a handful of UE devs here. You can use blueprint and C++ in the same project. You can also create your own nodes in c++ in that project to use in blueprint too.

[@BoroCG]

Yeah some would even say I'm kind of missing out on some performance/features by only using blueprints (nodes). But I'm not sure if that's super-relevant for a linear game using Nanite, VShadows and Lumen

[@MonsterJuiced]

@BoroCG yea I wouldn't worry too much right now. Concerns like that are for massive games that AA and AAA studios should worry about. Unreal Engine actually does a great job of filtering out all the unnecessary code during packaging. So only functions and assets that are actually being used in-game will be kept. So its not too bad at all really, only when your game reaches massive sizes and you want to cut down on as much as possible but by that point you'll want to be paying someone else to do that for you lol

[@3polygons]

@@MonsterJuiced Well, I am currently a freelancer (doing 2D (illustrations, pixel art, etc), 3D and graphic designer, but have been in the past employed in several game studios, and when (almost just curiosity) I look at local job offers, even in all the country, it's 99,99% Unity - I don't know why, honestly- . In some rare cases, they say "familiarity with Unity or Unreal engine is appreciated"... That is when they just want somebody (artist) that has some experience with game engines art pipelines in general, I guess (which I have, just "custom" game engines). But in most cases these studios want artists who won't get stuck (which... I wouldn't :D ) for not knowing deeply Unity. So, it is not for clients.. indeed, for freelancing, people never ask if I have touched Unity or Unreal, they just want their 3D models or 2D art at good quality and that's it.

[@3polygons]

Then it is a very sweet situation... heck, things have changed since 1997 - 2006 :D

[@ATomCzech]

Awesome. Yyou can add DLSS 3.5 and it will be fast enough ;-)

[@UnrealEnginecode]

What is the difference between dlss and virtual texture? Should we use both at the same time? thanks

[@marcotomaselliart]

nice!

[@garretthumbert3145]

hello

[@AllExistence]

Why is camera shaking so much? It might be nausating to some people.

[@BoroCG]

Yeah I am aware that may be an issue, but first I just want to make the game the exact way I want it. Later, I can add options to turn off certain features etc.

[@MonsterJuiced]

Do you mean the players camera in-game?

[@BoroCG]

Yeah I added a slight shake to it, as if it's kind of handheld

[@Vex.gamedesign]

👍👍👍👍👍👍

[@andriilebid8137]

theres so much misleading and plain wrong terminology and information in this video i basically would not recommend anyone watching this.

[@deaddiamond7554]

Like what bit

[@lt.facepalm9566]

yeah, what part? tell us, i'm here to learn about optimization *hands mic*

[@FishMan1nsk]

Regarding optimization. Dude you've picked a wrong engine for your game!!! UE5 is a garbage. Epic Games just trying to sell this engine for everyone because they want to make money from it. But the truth is that this engine is not production ready. All this bullshit technologies like VSM, Nanite and Lumen are made so they work tight together and the problem is that they just can't provide you the good perfomance natively as well as applying so much restriction on your contnent so the benefits that you getting not even worth it. And you cant just disable them. When you disable something - everything just collapses. This engine is made for one purpose - to be runned on high end NASA computers. And the graphics that you will get at the end if you are an indie developer (if you dont have like millions of budget and an army of developers) will still look mediocre, but the cost that your audience should pay for this - will be insane. So everyone will just hate you for releasing your game. And it is even worse you cant for example disable VSM's because without them nanite meshes become too expensive. And you cant disable Nanite - because VSM become too expensive without nanite. And the reason why you ever want to disable nanite not because it producing bad pefromance. No. But because there's so many restrictions with nanite so you basically will think about disabling on a regular basis. For example it does not support Vertex Paint for multple instances of a single mesh. And without VP - there's no other way to texture large stuff like buildings for example. It also does not support translucent materials. And with masked opacity nanite meshes become expensive. Lumen is just not production ready and should not be used at all, there's no way how you can optimize lumen it's just killng your perfomance and thats all. There's not even much settings to downgrade it. On our project we reduced every setting that was availble and it still killing the perfomance on our target specs. And for example when they showing you Lumen reflections they forgot to mention that on transparent objects like glass - the reflection looks like a low res garbage. And there's a lot of suggetions how you can fix this in Interntet but all of them are like enable some brute force technology like ray tracing or enable high res reflections in Post Process wich will make your perfomance even worse. So if you are not AAA studio - AVOID USING THIS ENGINE! Wait until big studios will figure out the pipe-lines and figure how this technologies should be used properly. Because if you will try to use this engine now - the only thing what is awaites you at the end is a falure and hatered from the players. Or wait untill Epic Games will do another game on this engine. Because they fixing and improving something in the engine only when they need this by them selfs. If you want a good perfomance with this foliage that you have - just use UE4. Yes the lighting will not be as pretty, but the perfomance will be MUCH better. And do not use Virtual Textures for your shaders. You can use RVT's but do not use VT's for every texture. Nanite is extremely bad with foliage especially if its made using masked opacity. Which is why everyone should avoid of using masked opacity on nanite meshes. I dont remember the exact reason why, but its something like when you using masked opacity on nanite mesh - the engine just starts rendering the mesh twice or something like that. Watch the GDC presentation from Epic Games called "Battle-Testing UE5 Next-Gen Systems with Fortnite" there's a lot of answers on how to optimize the content on this engine. One more thing: if you even disable all the UE5 features and basically make UE4 from UE5 - the perfomance will still be ~20% worse than on UE4. I say again - DO NOT USE THIS ENGINE! It is not ready to be used by small studios or individuals. Unless you making a porfolio or using it for cinematics or some static renderings. This engine SUCKS if you trying to make games on it. Just use UE4 instead. With lightmaps and small to medium maps on UE4 - you will not even need to think about perfomance that much, most of the job the engine will do by it's self. Its seems like Epic Games are more instrested in selling this engine to film companies for virtual production and all this fancy technologies are done specifically for this purpose.

[@TheLucifer92]

they are so much scarier just standing there almost like being part of the enviroment, you should actually really make them appear and/or react fast not that often