Bonus post (cus of skipped November)

It's the holidays, and I'm SUPER sorry I missed November, so I wanted to show y'all something silly. I think I've figured out how to handle this Patreon finally, and it'll basically just be me moving into Blueprint and showing Blueprint code instead of C#. So more node networks pictures, less copy-pasted C# code. Probably leaning toward UE5 stuff, since hey, UE5!

Anyways,

Behold (the above pic).

This tree I'm using here has over a million polygons. EVERY SINGLE TREE HERE has over a million polygons. LODs? Not in this UE5 project. Where we're going, we don't neeeeed LODs.

This ran perfectly fine. Believe it or not, it runs BETTER than equivalent "hahahaha holy crap I can't believe this works" forest tests I ran, like the below.

(btw every single one of these trees is, um, still a lot of polygons, this is not a hedge, these are all normal relatively complex video game trees)

... because of screen coverage issues, I think? Or maybe it's because our oops-all-polygon trees are entirely opaque polys, whereas these actual-trees have alpha-testing which is slightly more expensive? Who knows!

Anyways, Nanite + Lumen is crazy powerful. I'm spending my holiday break just seeing how far I can push it, and so far, um. HUH. It is not breaking. Even when it claims to be breaking, it's just a warning message that says "actually I'd be working fine if you increased this number here".

Why am I working on forests and trees and stuff? Because it's WILD that any of this is even possible. It took a billion tricks to get even remotely dense forests before, and they had tons of caveats. Just wandering around in a huge dense forest with little to no visible sky used to be this whole gigantic thing that only AAA games could even remotely pull off, and even they weren't really forests so much as tree lined corridors and just. Nope. Now it just works. No effort on my part, just poopin down some random trees I found in an asset store pack, with zero LODs or imposters or anything, and,

This is WILD. Now I'm gonna make some goofy Niagra particle effects of leaves falling and stuff and see how many of those I can pop in here before my GPU melts.

If you're curious, this is bleeding-edge Unreal 5.1 stuff. You couldn't do alpha-tested shaders on UE5.0, which meant no trees or grass. Oh, did I mention the grass is Nanite too? It is! Because 5.1 also added world-position-offset shaders into the Nanite-supported group, so you can have these incredibly dense forest scenes AND all the grass is waving and the trees are blowing in the breeze and oh my goodness.