thanks Bartosz 🙏

im really glad to hear this is benefitting you! is there anything you'd like to see a tutorial on?

@@DanielLanghjelm honestly one of the hardest part about using Unreal Engine is for things like cinematics. So for example understanding how to control weather or waves. It's one thing to be able to put a boat on the water, it's another thing to be able to control the waves via blueprints some how. Or removing water from a boat in Unreal Engine 5. Lots of little things you don't realize are a bit harder to work with than you'd usually think. I'd even love a tutorial over how to get more control of the elements by means of setting up the proper blueprints.

Sounds good! So things like exposing ultra dynamic sky or adding global wind parameters etc. I can definetly do tutorials like that 👍

Whoa... didn't get started yet, basically, and you pull out as _first thing first_ the most searched feature I was desperate to find in Unreal Engine. Thanks so much Daniel, what a kick-off! Instant subscription...

@@davidedemurodominijanni9889 thank you so much! I'm really glad this video is helpful :) let me know if there's something else I can record that you'd like to see

hey! i totally can :) i'll put it on the list!

I can definitely film one in the next couple days :)

@@DanielLanghjelm great, I'll be watching out for it. Thanks again

@@dow647 Hey Just Uploaded a full break down on creating a neutral scene :)

@@DanielLanghjelm, Thanks a million Daniel, that was quick. I got my popcorn and taking notes. Congrats on the subs.

Hey! Actually that’s part of the reason they are so optimized, only static meshes can be used in packed level actors. What you would be looking for is Level Instances which allow you to pack blueprints that have tick functionality, VFX and Lights, it’s the option above packed level actors :)

Yes, I wonder that also. What is the different methods advantage?

@@niclasjonssonifyi swear no one on the planet has the answer, been surfing on every videos about this and never got an answer x) Starting to think the only point is you get a Map asset ^^’

In theory you should be able to bake lights if you are not using lumen(as that disables light maps). This is very gameplay friendly as well! Valley of the ancients was built using this method actually :) of course the impact will depend on whether they use nanite, hierarchal instances static meshes etc.

Hey! I got a 4090 so it’s not that bad, but even so it’s always good to be thinking about gpu usage. It’ll depend on the size of the asset gym you open through the actor palette and the level you are working in. If you open a large palette while working in your main map you would more likely have a pretty big performance hit. How I typically use the palettes is having smaller gyms instead of all the assets in one palette (one for specific foliage, one for road pieces, one for building pieces etc) then I have a scene where I put everything together like the one in the video (neutral lighting and backdrop) once it’s built I pack it into a level actor for use in my actual scene. That way I’m keeping the usage relatively low 🙂

yeah there's a few! mainly that in packed level actors only static meshes are able to be used. This is different for Level Instances (The Other option) which allows you to have blueprint functionality, particles, decals etc. PLAs are also meant for World Partition. Despite working with the Level streaming method, we don't get streaming management the same way we would with world partition. Hope that helps!

@@DanielLanghjelm "packed level actors only static meshes are able to be used." This is a deal breaker for me. Can you do a vid on making Props (with BPs, Lights) with "Level Instances"? Ty

⁠@@kenalpha3 yeah for sure! I was planning on doing one on that soon actually :) PLA are meant for set dressing static meshes in broad strokes so I highly recommend using them for that

Hey! For that you would need to duplicate the level it created and make a blueprint from that unfortunately. I did some testing and just duplicating the blueprint actor it creates since it also is linked to the level that’s created. On my end Its faster to break it to see my variations next to the each other or inside my main scene if I need to have a unique look :)

@@DanielLanghjelm To add to this, that's a quirk of specifically PLAs vs LIs on their own. A weird thing (in my opinion) is that when you make an LI, it has world partition on by default which means it also has the one-file-one-actor setup which makes duplicating levels a bit more of a chore. PLAs are supposedly more render-optimized than LIs and I'm not quite sure how.

Good Call Out! thanks for adding to this :) From what I can tell PLAs are more optimized due to things like decals, effects and blueprint tick functionality not being supported where as LIs you can have blueprints, lights, particles. etc. Im going to be testing if i can still have constructor script functionality though when it comes to asset variation

@@DanielLanghjelm that would be very interesting to see! At work we have opted to avoid PLAs and LIs (sadly) because we are creating cinematic sequences in massive areas. So things like populating a 20x20km area of a city. The problem is that because PLAs and LIs don't seem to have an instancing structure similar to static mesh instancers, the outliner can't handle the 1000's of actors. Any ideas about how we might get around such a thing? I was pondering larger PLAs for sections of the map to reduce the bloat potentially.

@@ejaworenko yeah large areas are unstable from what I've seen. its a good thought trying to pack large areas into PLAs, actually tried that a while ago in 5.03 and i started crashing to the point where i couldn't open the actor itself, which sucks. It would be good to dive into the "valley of the ancients" pack as well as the "city sample" as they used the PLAs pretty heavily with the buildings, while it isn't a 20km x 20km its still pretty decent size and they got it working there. Im also working on a 5km x5kmPCG based city and will be experimenting with spawning PLAs in through that to see how it handles

Do you mean the neutral scene or the assets themselves? the assets are from the Quixel medieval environment, but the scene neutral scene is one i created :) I did a tutorial on how to set that up, but if theres a want for it to be readily available i can look into getting it on the market place / gumroad as well (and for free)

Hey! This is actually a UE5.0 onward feature which is why you don’t see it :)

Hey! The biggest differences is that packed level actors are optimized for rendering (only static meshes can be in a packed actor, level instances though can have blueprints and particles). They also take advantage of the one file per actor workflow and allow you to edit in context( in the level editor) they are also set up for streaming well with world partition and data layers.

@@DanielLanghjelm WoW that was fast! Now, I am a noob user, so i was told i could convert some static meshes into a blueprint to create Sort of a prefab, but never dived into It. I Will give this a go, It sounds interesting and i like to try new things! Thanks! Also, It is cool we have the same name haha!

@@deiniou it is pretty cool!Btw the blueprints ARE a great way for prefacing if you need functionality:) such as a lamp that you want to be able to turn on or off, or a camp fire with a light and VFX, definitely use them for that sort of thing!

@@DanielLanghjelm Awwww okay okay. You know, I was thinking on starting a channel just to show all the 3D nonsense I do, not because I think I can teahc anything like you, but because someone might find interesting to watch but also so that people like you could come and comment on things I could do to improve. For example, at the moment I am building a city from scratch, not with the intention of showing it as a final asset but as way to create a map in 3D isntead of drawing it, d'you think anyone could be interested in that?

1000% go for it! There’s always an audience and posting final /work in progress is a great idea, sort of like a dev blog, also check out some speed level design channels on KZfaq might provide inspiration :) hope that helps!! And let me know once you have one up. I’d love to see it :)

Hey! I have actually :) they are very performant. Im working on a large scale scene and use packed level actors for most of the scene. A great example is the valley of the ancients project was made using this method

@@DanielLanghjelm ok thank you!! I have another question, if I don't use nanite because it does not fit my stylized project for some reason, are there LODs per instance, or once one object is far everything goes low res how does that work?

@@Sunleashed yeah! Once you set up LODs on a static mesh asset, every instance in your scene of that mesh will have those LOD settings. However these instances with Have there LOD dynamically changed based on the screen percentage they take up. And this will be done per instance so this is done independently from each other. I would suggest to always use nanite in your project where you can. Even for stylized assets! It doesn’t affect the look of the asset as it’s basically a dynamic LOD system that works most efficiently when using it with both lumen and virtual shadows. There are still some very object and materials that aren’t fully supported yet, I can make a video on nanite in the future to talk more in-depth with how it works :)

@@DanielLanghjelm thank you again for your answer, yes I really want to see how they made their new real time trailer with the new vegetation and 4x4. I had problems running nanite with vegetation because of the shadow + wpo interaction that I use to simulate the wind. (I found a solution but it's hard to setup) I went into the new fortnite editor to see how they use nanite on tree, well they do not use nanite on trees.

I figured this out. Some of the actors are BPs, and they are creating SMs or repositioning them. The BPs don't function inside the packed level (I think because they're getting instanced). So it looks like you shouldn't pack BP actors, only SMs.

Though it appears it will also mess up the the transform of meshes sometimes; might be from packing, breaking, then packing again.

Hey! actually for this one i pulled them from the Quixel Medieval Village project, In that project they used megascans as base however created a lot of assets using the modeling tools and custom masks which i wanted to take advantage of :)

@@DanielLanghjelm oh I see it now, thanks. Also if you choose to two side the materials you could potentially use it having an inside as well..I'ma try it and see how it is when I get to my work computer next.

Not sure why this happens or how to prevent it, but seems that deleting the actor from the level and re-placing it fixes the issue.

Hey! yeah it was really low, got it fixed after this upload, the newest ones have way better volume :)

I’ve been noticing that! I’m looking into this to find a solution. Seams to be crashing for me when I convert a project to the latest version of unreal

Hey! it’s similar, however unreal hasn’t had this until 5.0, before we only had blueprints, Where it does work differently is how it works with the world partition feature of the engine which allows for optimized streaming of the content. This isn’t to say this is better than worse than unity, as that’s not the point of the video :)

@@DanielLanghjelm tbh i started with unity and was annoyed by how the blueprints were , unity prefabs is really good , so i am really looking forward to add this feature to my workflow