🌿 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

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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!

[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.

[Keshuaman]

5:54 "un p'tit verre d'eau" ahahah j'avais meme pas tilt avant que t'etait FR, gg une video tres intéressante, merci :D

[lastsonofktn]

Very awesome and useful tips for me as a beginner!! Looking forward to more of your videos for sure 😊

[michaelarby]

Brilliant video - Covered a lot of more advanced tips and optimisations that I havent seen elsewhere!

[xjuliussx]

my dear Valerian, this is one of best tutorials i could follow, also it's very calm(tks to your voice and intonation) and is very well explained. Please make more, cause i enjoy this one and i follow and encourage me to look more of your videos. Thank you for your research and video!

[mebessusn]

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

[larrybarnes]

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

[tomahawk]

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

[lesterzamora]

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

[Elon-nq]

Every time I change the placeholder texture to virtual streaming on, my engine crashes. Anybody know a way around this? Thanks and great video.

[Lukasz_Stan]

This are golden guides! Thanks a lot 💪

[jayhop]

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

[arash]

in 09:09 what type of wind system you use for those.

[juliotorres]

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.

[MadiNoe]

1:53 when i drag and drop the static mesh in the foliage it ask me to save the asset as... ?! What am i doing wrong :'(

[CAD_gaming]

Thanks this is gonna help a lot with my game.

[amelierxse]

great insightful video, thank you! :)

[boyjedi]

Great video. I just have a doubt, is there any difference in performance between landscape grass type and Procedural Foliage Spawner

[rdyin]

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