Billboard has double trunks because of the shape of the tree.

[morningstar666]

It's me again with yet another issue!

We did a couple pine trees for our game a few months back and only now we noticed the issue. We gave the pine tree a little curvature in in its trunk to give it more variety and thought it wouldn't cause issues, but when we rendered the billboards and imported it into UE4, we noticed that in certain angles the tree trunk appears duplicated. After checking and editing the tree (reducing the curve and properly centering it), we noticed that in certain angles (and thus certain billboards) the trunk appeared completely straight, so when the two billboards intersected instead of overlapping, it looked like two completely separate trunks. Attached is an image of the best result I could get after editing the tree without sacrificing the curve, as well as all the billboards.

My question is: Has anyone encountered this problem? is there any solution to this problem that doesn't involve making completely straight trees? Is there any way to edit which billboards are displayed/deleted when increasing/reducing the number of billboards? Actually, is there any way to edit the billboards at all in the current speedtree for UE4 version?

Thanks in advance!

[Greg Croft]

Hello,

You start to see this a little on very asymmetrical trees, because the orthogonal planes onto which the billboards are rendered can't adequately capture the curvature of the tree.

The easiest solution, as you mentioned, is more planes. You can't do this with the auto-compile the Modeler does on save, but you can run the SpeedTree Compiler directly and edit the number of billboards there. After import into UE4, go to the SpeedTree node in the billboard material and change the billboard threshold until you get adequate results. (with more billboards, you'll want to knock out more tightly to the view direction).

Hope this helps