I’ve tried to google this problem, I’m sure otherse have had it too, but I cannot seem to find a way to fix it.
My trees kind of warp/twist/turn in a very weird way when in the editor, but also when playing the game. Is there any way to stop this, prevent it, or fix it? It looks crazy, and it breaks the game’s immersion completely.
I’ve tried to look for ways to fix this by googling, but I haven’t found an answer or anyone with the same problem. Maybe I’m not googling correctly… But I would really appreciate it if someone could help me out here. This issue is really, really bothering me.
Larbertram has redone some of the tree billboard shaders, to address this issue. Check out his ATS shader packages. It will keep you from having to sacrifice performance for nice trees.
To elaborate on what Eric said, there are actually a few values you will want to look at in the terrain settings.
Billboard Start - This is the distance at which trees start to transform from billboards (static images) into actual fully-modeled trees. The larger this is, the better trees will look, but there’s a performance hit.
Fade length - This is basically the amount of distance over which the tree will warp from billboard to actual tree orientation. Making this larger like Eric suggested will cause it to warp more slowly and maybe be less noticable, but if your Billboard Start is still low, then this value is mostly useless as you’ll still notice that they warp as you move towards them, they just do it more slowly or might warp quickly as they first transition and then more slowly as you get closer. If you set it really low the trees will instantly “pop” from billboard to actual tree which will also look bad.
Max Mesh Trees - The total number of trees that can be shown on screen as actual trees; if this is too low and you’re in a forest, some of the trees will be billboards even if you’re close to them.
So ideally you’ll want to increase Billboard Start and Max Mesh Trees, and have Billboard Fade Length at not too large a value.