5 Tips to Optimize Environments in Unreal Engine 4 

Great, you're welcome!

Good to hear that, thanks for watching!

Thank you for the kind words! I'm working full steam on new videos and the course, so when I publish all of this, I hope more people will be interested in the content. The results are not yet visible but the snowball effect is coming.

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Glad you enjoyed, thanks!

Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks for watching!

Thanks!

Thanks for watching!

Yeah, optimizing from the start will save you a ton of time, cheers!

Thanks!

My pleasure, cheers!

Thanks for watching!

Dzięki wielkie!

Thanks for watching!

Thanks for watching!

Thanks for watching!

Thank you!

You're welcome!

Thanks for watching!

Cheers!

Thanks for watching!

Thanks!

Thank you!

Yeah, I should really do it.

@ WOoters.

Definitely, as I believe Unreal Engine has never been so accessible. I started not too long ago. Would love to understand how to optimize in UE5!

Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks.

@ No problem, man!

The main problem with lumen is we can't do much optimization, it's just a system that we turn off and on. In theory, we can reduce the quality and play with some console commands, but I think it's a bad idea, and it's easy to mess sth up. Epic said that it should be more performant in UE 5.1, but I don't know when it'll come out, so we are in a bit weird spot right now.

@okay. Thanks

Thanks for watching. I keep that in mind!

Glad I could help. Thanks!

Yea actually I just wanna add that this really helped, the LOD system is very powerful but not many people have gone into the detail like you have. Such a simple tickbox but almost always overlooked

Cheers!

Once is enough for me, thank you so much!

Thanks, I really appreciate that!

Megascans material is quite optimized. If you want to have something faster I would consider creating your own master material from scratch.

to reduce draw calls, you need an optimised Mesh. The more texture your mesh have, the more Draw call you will have. 1 Mesh can have 4 texture... Albedo, Normal, Roughness, Metalic, AO. some have Specular and more.. Each of those texture will call a Draw. I made an unoptimised mesh, with 25 texture... 25 draw calls. If i put 10 of this Mesh in game, i can see a drop in FPS. So the number of texture a mesh has is important too. The less is has, the better it is.

Haha great to hear that. I'm gonna have new erosion brushes coming up in 2024 so stay tuned.

Yeah, considering the new features and systems in UE5, and how heavy they are, I have to.

Happy to hear that, thanks!

Thanks for watching!

Thanks for watching!

I don't think that's nanites fault. You can check what causes this decreased performance using GPU VIsualizer and compare with nanite on and off. I bet the problem is with the shadows.

I don't create 2D games, but if I had to I would just stick with 2D models with color variation to create depth in the image using distance from camera and combine it with fog. But of course, if you want those mountains to be 3D and still high quality you can just turn on Nanite in UE5 and increase the number of triangles to about 6-8 times without any problems.

@ Thank you so much for the reply!! I am trying to move my project from UE4.26 to UE5. But, I'm running into compilation issues. I will try Nanite, and let you know!

Thanks!

Thanks!

Glad I could help.

For the majority of things, yeah.

Thank you for the kind words!

you are everywhere 🤣

When it comes to creating good landscapes in UE, layer painting is the best thing we have right now and it can produce realistic results, but you need to use quality textures (e.g. megascans), and have a good landscape material, which will hide the texture repetition, and scale your textures based on your distance. Remember that landscape is just a base layer, in every game you have a lot of stuff put on it, like grass, trees, buildings. Once I read about how Rockstar optimized landscape in GTA5 and it turns out, it's divided into sections, and when you are far enough, a part of a landscape switches to a single draw-call mesh with its own texture, and that's how they made the game work smoothly. Hope it helps!

Yeah, Virtual Texturing is now "go to" thing especially for high resolution textures.

@ It increased GPU overhead cost so it might not be suitable for every project.

If you set up good LOD reduction and distance settings, it's hard to spot loss of quality in the final image.

Thanks for watching, that's actually a very interesting topic. I personally think that many games aren't that optimized because companies focus on optimization at the end. They want to show great realistic graphics in their products and that's why they put it off until the later stages of development. I understand their point of view, they want to make as much money as they can, but it can also affect their reputation. An example of it may be Cyberpunk on PS4, for sure optimization was done at the end of development (frames were often dropping and quality was really bad). Good project optimization should start with pre-production, and finding a balance between quality and performance is the key to making gamers satisfied in terms of game graphics and gameplay fluidity.

Nanite is way better than LODs. I recorded this video when nanite wasn't even a thing.

You still need a balance XD

The problem still exist. Nanite can be impressive but it can't work on trees and foliages which are 90% of my scene.

@@garrytalaroc laugh in ue5.1

@@samuelkilik8233 nanite foliage is a heaven sent for my project.

@@garrytalaroc it can

Haha thanks!

Now in Unreal Engine 5 there are many more ways to optimize your projects.

Thanks for watching.