Landscape & Foliage Interaction for UE4 [For 100+ Actors] (Part 1 of 3)

Part 2: • Landscape & Foliage De...
Part 3: • Landscape & Foliage De...
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DO THIS FIRST! - Tommy's Tutorial:
www.raywenderl...
There is an error around 21:00 where I forgot to cut out a couple of steps before I did a re-take (the subtract/multiply combo in the Foliage Material)
A little optimization/fix: imgur.com/a/dG...
This reduces the directional data to 4 texture samples because the +1 and -1 annihilate in the centre (which is what the middle texture was originally used for)
I'm a musician, videographer and audio engineer and have been exploring GameDev for about 4 months now. All of my comments on performance are purely from my own observations and my current understanding of graphics/computing etc etc. That being said, I do believe having a unified system between Landscape and Foliage that share the same render target texture is really really cool as it means the operation of scene capture is never going to waste (ie. when you're standing in grass and not snow, you're using it to deform the grass. When you're standing in snow but not grass, you're using it to deform the terrain. It's never just "running in the background" which is what having multiple systems would result in)
I would really appreciate some constructive feedback on how to improve this existing method, rather than completely re-engineer it. I'm particularly curious about having a persistent blurred texture so we don't have to blur it separately in both the Landscape and in the Foliage Material; this would save a billion instructions.
I also want to stress that you should aim to have your SpiralBlur's step values AS LOW AS POSSIBLE; it's only there to achieve any sort of Grey value to run through a Sine to get our upwards bumps. It can be a sucky-ass node and it's only there because the texture is created in real-time. I wish there was another way to blur Render Targets (?).
You could also completely cut out the Horizontal Foliage Deformation section as I feel it's a little bit of a hack-job and doesn't add THAT much to the overall effect, but it was fun to explore regardless. I'll be looking for more efficient ways to get some directional data from the B/W texture in the future!
I'd like to give a shout out to Rainy for showing me Tommy's tutorial in the first place which inspired me to explore scene capture and render targets further! Follow development of his game SunnySide here: / @rainygames
Last but not least, I want to thank the awesome community at r/UnrealEngine for their kind words about my project and for doubling my subscriber count overnight while I was asleep! You guys are weird as heck xoxoxo
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Ryzen 3900x 12-core CPU
MSI Geforce RTX 2080 Super
64GB Corsair RAM
One of those fancy nvme m.2 SSD's
Programs of choice:
Unreal Engine 4 - (Game Dev)
Blender 2.8 - (Animation and Modelling)
OBS - (Video/screen capture)
Davinci Resolve - (Video editing)
Adobe Photoshop - (Graphics and Texturing)
Quixel Mixer - (Texturing)
ProTools 11 - (Compositions and mixing)
OldSchool Runescape - (Chillax time)
Filmed using:
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Yonguo YN360 LED's for colour
Yongnuo YN760 chip LED w/ Godox softbox for key
My lovely cats names are Boycat, Girlcat and Ladycat :)