This post is exploring the use of LOS’s within Unreal 4 and how they effect the look of a world, as well as how you alter them.

I decided to experiment with the foliage tool, as I wanted to try it out for myself, so I could document how realistic and achievable this project is for my desired output. I downloaded a free tree pack from google: https://gumroad.com/l/aBLPQ

As the trees are not the highest quality, they did not take long to load. Although I noticed that the leaves looked extremely strange and just appeared like grey squares, and only when I zoomed in very closely did they look like actual leaves.

Therefore, I decided to do some research and asked for help… I learned that this was due to the LODs’s, and by altering the settings of the LOD’s, it would fix this issue, although the performance would reduce, for this experiment the quality of the trees are more important than performance.

I used this video to help me and found it very useful:

What it is? What did they do and why?

Game Dev Academy created a YouTube series explaining how to create a scene in UE4 which is very useful, and he splits up every section in episodes. In this episode, he explains the use of LODs (Level of Detail) in UE4.  He has done this to help beginners and less experienced creatives learn this skill so that they can improve.

In this part of my Unreal Engine 4 Beginners Tutorial, I’ll show you how to import the tree we’ll be adding to the environment a little later. You will also create the material for the tree and work with the LOD settings.

What exactly will you learn from it? What can you take forward from this for a production project?

From this video, I have learned what LOD’s do and why they are used, I also learned how to alter them to make assets look more detailed based on distance. This is very useful and can be used in future projects when I need to have more detail in close areas and less detail in further areas.

What it does well?

The way he explains everything in this video, it makes it very easy to understand which is appreciated. He goes into detail and tries to explain everything as much as he can, he also speaks very clearly and supports this by visually explaining it too.

Where it falls short?

The output is not as impressive as previous tutorials, but he does give important direction which will benefit me strongly.

From this, I now know how to change the Level of Detail in assets/ meshes and how altering makes a massive impact, and I can use this for any future projects, as it is useful knowledge to have.