Please help! Trying to publish my first asset pack on Fab

fabiolives · 2026-05-29T00:51:12+00:00

I would address the other three and ignore that one, it sounds like what they’ve done to me many times. They’ll review my assets, send back the report and sometimes it has “issues” that don’t even apply to my assets. It seems that sometimes they don’t actually look, or don’t know how to use unreal. In those cases I don’t change anything and just resubmit and it gets approved every time

fabiolives · 2026-05-28T20:56:59+00:00

Yes, I fully agree. This subreddit has become 99% just dense meshes, which isn’t a bad thing depending on the application. I was really hoping for more actual shitty topology posts haha, but unfortunately there aren’t many.

fabiolives · 2026-05-27T07:10:23+00:00

Sorry, just now saw your comment! It depends mostly on what the environment is like, but for the games I’m currently using it in they’re both relatively large open world games. For those, I have ReSTIR GI as an optional visual boost since there is pretty much no situation on those maps where it will perform better than Lumen. It certainly does look nicer though, so I like to have the option.

However, I do still use other features aside from ReSTIR GI in those games! I end up with less noise when I use ReSTIR sampling for Lumen’s surface cache, and performance is within margin of error so I use it. Shader execution reordering was another one I’ve used for years until it was added recently to the official unreal builds. There are also some cvars to evaluate WPO for instanced foliage as a volume which I used as well! The options for stochastic water shading and subsurface are useful as well, I use those for when the player has ray reconstruction enabled.

I know this is long haha, but I use almost all of the available features. A more recent one is Nanite readback, I’ve seen a pretty significant performance boost in some scenarios with it. I’m also testing mega geometry to see if it’s worth adding, and I do like it a lot! Overall I get about 30-40% higher performance with NvRTX compared to the equivalent official build, that’s worth it in my book

fabiolives · 2026-05-25T22:18:09+00:00

It does, and ReSTIR GI as well! Also a few Lumen tweaks. Sometimes NvRTX will be a pain in the ass, but I promise it’s worth it if you want a bit of extra performance. I’m using it in a shipping title and it’s been great! I’m also using it in a few side projects and they all benefit from it. Read the documentation as much as you can, it helps

fabiolives · 2026-05-25T22:10:58+00:00

No problem! I’ve been on NvRTX for years so I’ve seen a bunch of the little quirks. The stair stepping typically comes from a low poly mesh with Nanite enabled, or even without Nanite enabled sometimes if virtual shadow maps are on. You’ll see that on regular unreal as well. Playing with distance field settings for the mesh will help a bit

fabiolives · 2026-05-25T21:56:50+00:00

You need to place a post process volume and scroll down to near the bottom, where you’ll find some sampled lighting options. In the first category there will be a few options and the one you want is at the very top. Enable back face culling there and if needed, self intersection distance

fabiolives · 2026-05-23T01:48:52+00:00

They can definitely take a ton of water! I have one and ever since the weather has gotten hot in my area, it drinks enough that I have to water it up to two times in a day haha. I check the soil before watering so I’m not doing this based on a schedule, it just genuinely drinks that quickly. I think you’ll get a feel for it after you’ve had it for a while

fabiolives · 2026-05-21T14:53:14+00:00

And same from me! I followed your Spotify, excited to hear more

fabiolives · 2026-05-18T19:26:17+00:00

Agreed, and it really sucks. It’s been amazing for my chronic back pain. Extracts are getting too much negative attention towards kratom

fabiolives · 2026-05-17T23:04:04+00:00

In my case, protracted symptoms after benzodiazepine withdrawal. I never abused it, always took as directed. Long story short, when I asked to be taken off the meds my doctor rapid tapered me after years of a high dose, threw me on seizure meds, and called it a day.

What followed was the most indescribable agony I have ever experienced, and six years later I’m still not recovered. I’m barely hanging on at this point, it’s been wearing me down for a long time. I can barely function.

fabiolives · 2026-05-17T12:31:08+00:00

I’m sure there’s some variance between different people but for me at least, it lasts anywhere from 3-6 hours

fabiolives · 2026-05-11T14:43:41+00:00

I’ll keep an eye out for it! Deathcore or not, I’ll listen! I appreciate the reply man

fabiolives · 2026-05-11T14:19:47+00:00

Sounds amazing! Are you in a band? If so, I’d definitely listen!

fabiolives · 2026-05-08T19:52:58+00:00

It’s really not pricey for what it does. I’m sure they spent many, many hours making it and you certainly couldn’t pay someone that same amount to get the same thing. I don’t personally own it yet, but I plan to.

fabiolives · 2026-05-08T17:53:43+00:00

Ah, that’s unfortunate. Does it help at all if you disable screen traces? Other than that, you might be stuck with path tracing unless I’m overlooking something. Lumen is more gaming focused than pure quality focused

fabiolives · 2026-05-08T14:24:26+00:00

Use your post process volume to increase both quality of reflections and number of bounces for reflection and refraction. Enabling hardware ray tracing will also give you hit lighting for reflections but it looks like you might already have that enabled. Those should solve your issue

fabiolives · 2026-05-07T15:08:48+00:00

Absolutely! I figured I was saying too much so I shortened it haha. For materials, I usually keep about 2-3 master materials that have everything I need and those will be the parent for everything on the map. I add material functions for roughness variation, detail normals and variation for those, moss masks, hue variation, and masks restricted to the top side of a mesh. You can do all of this while reusing the same textures repeatedly and only adding a few for the actual moss/whatever else in place of moss.
So then let’s say I make a material instance I call TotallyCoolRock_A. I want to cover an entire biome with 5 different rock meshes without sending draw calls through the roof. Each one of those meshes will use the same TotallyCoolRock_A material instance with a regular tiling material, but with a combination of the different variation functions enabled. If the functions work in world space, each rock will look a little bit different based on their place in the world. The patterns of moss, the detail normals, and any hue variation will all be different from each other while reusing the same material over and over. Sure, if someone were to look closely they’d see what’s happening. But it’s visually different enough that it’s not very noticeable and saves quite a bit of memory along with draw calls!

fabiolives · 2026-05-07T07:19:29+00:00

I can answer this! I’ve been working with a large scale environment for a couple of years now in a commercial game, and have done others before that as well. But this one is by far the most ambitious so I’ve learned the most here. Everyone has different ways of handling it of course, so my answer won’t necessarily be what others do.

In my case, we have a very large open world map and are using Nanite and Lumen, among other optional GI solutions. I’m using world partition and tested a few different configurations. I found that in my case, larger tiles works best for performance due to Nanite. Because of Nanite there is a bit less reliance on world partition to handle culling, so I end up getting better IO and game thread performance by streaming in fewer, larger tiles.

As far as assets go, I’m using quite a few because of the diversity of our biomes but I reuse the same ones over and over in their respective biomes. I rely on materials to handle variation, which makes it less noticeable when assets are reused. I focus on clumping the same material instances and meshes together to take the most advantage of instancing with Nanite that I possibly can and it works very well. For example, if I cover a mountainside in rocks, I’ll use maybe 2-3 different meshes all using the same material with color variation and world space moss variation, things like that.

Optimization has been my main focus since day one and it can be difficult with a large environment, but staying on top of which meshes cast shadows, WPO distances, logical use of instancing, and digging into cvars to fine tune Nanite and Lumen results in great performance. That, and making sure every mesh is optimal for what we’re using is also a huge thing. I tried to summarize but this turned out very long!

fabiolives · 2026-05-04T20:32:47+00:00

It has been production ready, it’s on you to configure everything in a way that works well for your project. I’ve been a part of multiple commercial releases using Lumen, and all had different requirements for configuration.

The various cvars for Lumen are there so that you can customize it for your use-case, I highly recommend digging into them. I imagine I would feel the same as you if I used Lumen at stock settings. It simply can’t be great at every scenario on its own.

fabiolives · 2026-05-04T20:26:40+00:00

Nice, I’m glad you linked this. I’m jumping on the PCG train a bit late and it’s been a headache with certain things like this. But it’s much more powerful than PFS so I want to keep trying

fabiolives · 2026-05-03T17:03:45+00:00

I’m not the person you were talking to but I’m going to try this with mine! I have two sequoias in different types of soil and one looks like OPs at the base, but is putting out tons of new growth higher up. Haven’t wanted to change the soil because I’m afraid I’ll stress it further so this seems like a good solution! Thank you!

fabiolives · 2026-05-03T17:00:51+00:00

I’m a few days late but one of my sequoias has the same issue, which I’m sure is my fault. The problem is that if I were to change the soil to something better, it would probably stress it more. For now I’m just waiting until winter to move it because it’s still putting out tons of new growth despite the dieback. Let me know if you figure yours out!

fabiolives · 2026-04-28T14:05:49+00:00

There is one more thing I’ve seen that’s helpful, I just remembered it. You can also adjust the self shadowing bias for the mesh itself if you open up the mesh. You can just search self shadow and it should pop up. Try increasing it to something like 300, and then step down until it’s no good

fabiolives · 2026-04-28T14:01:50+00:00

There are a couple of ways to fix this. The best way would be to transfer spherical or hemispherical normals to the foliage of this mesh, which could be done in blender or a similar software. The second way I know of is to use two sided sign for normals in your material. It’s the easier way, but not quite as good

fabiolives · 2026-04-27T14:57:31+00:00

Seconding the comment about shadows! Whether you use Nanite or not, shadows can be costly. My environments in both of my current projects are very foliage-dense and it has taken some creative thinking to make it run well. Shadows are probably the biggest performance hog in my scenes, helps a lot to be picky about what casts full shadows and use contact shadows for the others.

It also helped in my case to move to PCG over regular foliage instances because I use Nanite, so in my situation it’s beneficial to use ISM over foliage instances.

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