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Some shots from exterior levels we're working on for our narrative FPS. Completely remaking our foliage for that 👀

Using nanite in unreal to model out as much as possible and avoid alpha masking. We'll see how that goes, trees like spruce and conifers are definitely hard to make substantial and lush without literally adding millions of polys. Still experimenting here!

Looks nice and promising! Reducing alpha masking is the way to go performance-wise even without nanite (last of us 2's grass is mostly without alpha). If you use Nanite you might want to have a bit of WPO on your foliage material to simulate perf as it's usually a huge hit for Nanite.

No interviews or talks dedicated to it sadly. No PC version for a frame analysis either. A lot of those knee-high grass are almost without alphas, combined with alpha test ground cover. They do still use a lot of alpha tested high grass, after checking it's a lot more than I remembered.

Couldn't find any good footage of those, but I remember their far LODs had no alpha for big grass patches to keep the shape intact and avoid the TAA eating it away. Best solution is often on the shader side: removing alpha and inflating geometry-only grass based on distance

Unreal being fully deferred is tough with vegetation. Transparency overdraw is very expensive, and trading vertices for transparent pixel overdraw is well worth it. Don't know if it is for Nanite, as WPO and very thin geometry is super expensive.