Let's Build the RPG! - 9 – Unreal Engine 5 Foliage Painting

In this episode, I show how to create foliage assets for static meshes like rocks, but also how to use the standard foliage assets that come automatically with foliage from Quixel Bridge. By the end of this episode, you will know how to paint foliage across your landscape. We'll also cover common issues you might see when painting foliage, and how to fix them. Lastly, we cover how to enable wind on your foliage assets. Link to spreadsheet of all meshes and materials used so far in this series (as of episode 9): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/... 00:00 Intro 00:14 Today's Goals and Key Concepts 01:39 Organizing foliage content folders 03:53 How to enable Complex Collision on rock assets 04:35 Preparation: Examining assets in the world 05:03 Solving 'Texture Streaming Pool Over Budget' issue 06:13 building a frame for painting our scene 09:41 Overview of Foliage Types 11:41 Creating Static Mesh Foliage type 14:53 Foliage Mode: Settings for Painting Foliage 18:05 Duplicating Foliage assets for each static mesh 19:07 Final preparation of each foliage asset before painting 20:05 Tracking Performance: Frames per Second (FPS) 21:44 Painting Rock Foliage (actual painting) 23:04 Play testing what we painted, trial and error adjustments 25:45 Plant foliage setup including collision testing so that plants don't get painted on rocks 27:32 Painting plant foliage (actual painting) 28:17 Testing painted plant foliage 29:37 Enabling foliage wind 32:35 Conclusion and preview of next episode Quick note regarding a potential issue you may encounter: I've noticed that if you update the M_MS_Default_Fuzz_Material like we did last episode before you ever bring in any Megascans assets that actually use that material, when you first bring in a Megascans asset that uses the material, it will overwrite the M_MS_Default_Fuzz_Material with the original setup. So then you'll need to re-add the Material Function from the last episode to the fuzz material to get it properly blending in with your landscape. But once you have an asset using that material it shouldn't rewrite it going forward. New episode released every Saturday morning! Direct References Fixing 'Texture Streaming Pool Over Budget' error: https://www.techarthub.com/fixing-tex... How Instanced Heirarchical Meshes work: https://www.undeaddev.com/lets-play-w... If you want to set up grass rather than Static Mesh Foliage: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en... General References Quixel Bridge: https://quixel.com/bridge (comes automatically with UE5) Megascans: https://quixel.com/megascans What's the relationship between Quixel Bridge and Megascans? Bridge is basically the tool for bringing it into UE5, Megascans is the library. Official documentation on Nanite: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-... Official documentation on Foliage: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en... Official documentation on performance: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en... We will continue to cover performance in many episodes. The implications of performance (and the goal of improving performance without sacrificing the quality of the experience) is universal across many aspects of a game. Official documentation on LOD's: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en... https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en... Music used this episode: Coastline – Ason ID Freedom – Atch Noodles – Another Kid Moment – Amine Maxwell Moments – Sarah Jansen Vacation – Markvard When you Realize – Mauro Somm Tribute – Ason ID Downstream – Lyvo Uncut Gems – Mezhdunami Void Edge – Lesion X Everything you Need is By Your Side – Vlad Gluschenko