Hi Guys,
I've noticed this new Bake to Foliage feature and wanted to talk about performance implications of different baking types especially since UE4.22 introduced auto instancing.
So from my previous experience with UE4.21, baking a huge amount of instances (I'm talking about 10-100K instances) into Static Meshes Actors was giving a big impact on performance so no go. There where also HISMs (Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes) with LODs that seemed like a good solution (which were generated by Bake Blueprint button). However, the caveat was that occlusion and camera culling only works per actor and it would not cull individual HISMs and at some point would give even bigger performance impact than using static meshes. So my solution was to split instances into clusters inside of Houdini HDAs by providing clusters number and cluster index and would bake out individual clusters into separate blueprints with HISMs which would allow for better culling. It was working pretty ok for my needs but the setup and baking process was a little bit daunting. There were other issues with too large lightmaps and HISM LODs distances not behaving correctly in UE4 so still not ideal.
Now having UE4.25 with static meshes auto instancing and ability to bake to foliage tool with Houdini Engine I wonder if there is a better way to handle instances not only for foliage scattering but also for procedural/modular geometry.
So the questions are:
- Do we still need HISMs and Foliage baking or it's best to use Bake to Static Mesh Actors and let UE4 auto instancing to do the rest?
- What benefits Bake to Foliage provides comparing to HISMs blueprint, cause as far as I understand Foliage is HISMs underneath, no?
Does it solve culling issues at least and maybe even lightmaps and LODs behaviours?
- Does anyone have a better workflow for procedural/modular geo to share? I'm trying to find a way to efficiently render models like the one attached bellow which is made of a bunch of individual instanced pieces.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience in advance!