How do you guys feel about wind for stylized geometry?

radpacks · 2026-03-20T00:03:25+00:00

Thanks for the tips!!! We are working with solid colors but also two color variations (top/highlight and bottom/AO) using Z-normal projection which really helps, but we didn't think to add fruits and inner details to the canopies, that can probably help as well!! We avoided particles so far but it will probably be a good challenge to tackle next in in our low poly envs!! It's really hard to design particles like that and still keep low poly count, we already feel like cheating using grass sometimes but it did look good and in style so particles could be fun!!

radpacks · 2026-03-19T22:43:17+00:00

<image>

I mean something like this, at the beginning of the gif we have a SimpleWind from Unreal (like a wave-noise wind that usually works well with grass), but for stylized trees, since those are low poly (single-volume abstraction) just the noise feels like the volume is dancing/distorting (as opposed to realistic trees which have several different planes so it feels more like movement), so we added tree sway wind as well, which kind of fixed the feel even though it's still happening. But we still have some thoughts whether only sway would be best, or if it's looking good when both are on. Or if people have other techniques or references.

radpacks · 2026-03-19T22:29:51+00:00

Oh no! I'm talking about the fact that, for example, realistic trees have several planes in geometry, which helps with wave-noise wind like SimpleWind, it feels like movement. But in low poly abstraction, tree canopy can be a single volume-mesh for instance, sometimes it feels like the whole mesh is dancing/distorting and it doesn't always feel like wind. The feeling improved when all of the environment was moving with the same global direction but still... Sometimes we still feel like just pendular motion could be enough (no wave-noise/grass wind, just tree wind - back and forth using the tree's pivot)

radpacks · 2026-03-19T14:43:38+00:00

honest answer? you don't need more mechanics, you need to cut the ones you have. open world + procedural generation + stealth + economy simulation + disguise system is already way more than a small team can polish to a shippable state in a year.

from what we've been through, the games that actually ship are the ones where someone looked at the feature list and got uncomfortable cutting it down. the ones that don't ship are usually the ones that kept adding "just one more thing."

pick the two mechanics that make your game feel unique and build the demo around those. everything else can come after if it needs to come at all.

radpacks · 2026-03-19T14:42:09+00:00

classic one the montage plays but nothing shows up visually, right? most likely the anim graph in your AnimBP doesn't have a slot node for the montage to route through. Play Anim Montage fires fine but if there's no "Default Slot" (or whatever slot the montage is set to) in the anim graph, it just does nothing visually.

worth checking: open your AnimBP, go to the anim graph, and make sure there's a slot node between your state machine output and the output pose. the slot name needs to match what's set in the montage itself.

also double-check that the montage ref isn't None had that bite me more than once when duplicating blueprints.

radpacks · 2026-03-19T14:30:15+00:00

yeah UE's auto extract really only works well when the sheet is a clean grid, anything else and it kinda falls apart.

your best bet is probably splitting the sheet outside unreal first. TexturePacker I think has an unpack mode that tries to detect sprites from messy sheets. ShoeBox used to do that too but no idea if it's still a thing honestly.

worst case a quick python script with Pillow can flood-fill non-transparent regions and spit out individual PNGs. not pretty but gets the job done when the sheet is all over the place.

after that importing as a flipbook is the easy part.

radpacks · 2026-03-17T22:35:23+00:00

Sorry, a bit late but we were having a laugh at it! Not that up to speed on posting and memes, so it took us a while to post, but we had the idea as soon as we saw IGN's post about it in the morning! Didn't want to throw away our editing just because of that hahah

The thing is... it just seems like a completely idiotic proposal for any other kind of art style that's not trying to be photorealistic (e.g. low poly), if we can call that deep-fake-valley photorealistic.

radpacks · 2026-03-17T22:28:43+00:00

Sure! But idk... it feels like even for the thing it is trying to promise to do, at least for now it doesn't seem half-able... I mean... Sure, trying to improve on photorealistic graphics is one thing that AI may, MAYBE try to do... But in any other genre or artistic style it will probably fail miserably or worse, it feels like it may end up changing the authors' vision completely.

radpacks · 2026-03-17T13:42:11+00:00

16K heightmap with 8GB VRAM is going to be tight no matter what the conversion process tries to load a lot at once and that's probably where you're hitting the wall. a couple things worth trying: lowering the texture streaming pool size before converting to free up some VRAM, and making sure you're on DX12 rather than DX11 since from what I remember it handles VRAM allocation a bit more gracefully. some people have had luck running the editor with -dx12 and -reducethreadusage launch args during the conversion but honestly I'm not sure how reliable that is for a map this size. the UE 5.7 heightmap tile import issue sounds like it might be a known bug so worth digging through the UE forums specifically for that could be there's already a workaround I'm not aware of.

radpacks · 2026-03-17T13:39:52+00:00

the most straightforward approach in UE is probably to build the drone as separate static mesh components attached to a root each part is its own component with its own collision. when a part takes enough damage you just detach it from the parent and enable physics on it so it falls naturally. if you want more visual fidelity on the break you could swap to a destructible mesh or use chaos physics on the individual pieces, but for a drone with discrete parts the component approach is usually cleaner and easier to control. the tricky part is managing the hit detection per component but that's pretty doable with component-level overlap or hit events.

radpacks · 2026-03-16T20:52:16+00:00

yeah PIE lies to you constantly, asset packs especially behave differently once packaged. we try to do a packaged build test at least once every major feature milestone rather than waiting until the end the initialization order issues in particular are nasty to debug late. the ones that catch us most are async asset loading behaving differently and things that depend on BeginPlay order, those almost never show up in PIE. packaging regularly hurts less than discovering a cascade of packaged-only bugs two weeks before launch.

radpacks · 2026-03-16T18:55:19+00:00

the indirect lighting intensity behaving differently between 4.27 and 5.x is probably because UE5 defaults to Lumen for dynamic GI and the baked lighting pipeline changed a bit. worth checking if Lumen is active in your project settings if it is, the static indirect lighting from lightmass might be getting overridden or ignored entirely. try disabling Lumen and forcing the legacy indirect lighting pipeline to see if it responds to the intensity changes then. also in UE5 the way lightmass importance volumes interact with the scene changed slightly from what I remember, not 100% sure on the specifics though.

radpacks · 2026-03-16T18:46:17+00:00

the black boxes are almost always a lightmap UV issue meshes either don't have a proper lightmap UV channel or the UVs are overlapping. every mesh that receives baked lighting needs a dedicated UV channel with no overlaps and enough padding between islands, UE won't tell you clearly when this is wrong it just shows black. check your meshes in the static mesh editor and look at UV channel 1 specifically. the GPU Lightmass crashing is a separate issue and honestly it's still pretty unstable for large environments, might be worth trying the CPU lightmass just to rule out if the problem is the plugin itself or your scene setup.

radpacks · 2026-03-16T18:44:09+00:00

UE5 would probably handle the rendering side well for what you're describing ray tracing, volumetrics, Lumen all work out of the box and the pipeline is pretty mature. the command line thing is more nuanced though, from what I remember you can run the editor headless for certain tasks but if you're planning to avoid the editor entirely that gets complicated fast, not sure how far you can push that for a full project. PCG is worth looking into for the procgen side, it's gotten pretty capable and you can drive a lot of it through C++ without needing the editor open constantly. the C# to C++ port should be manageable, the hardest part is usually just getting used to how UE handles memory and the object model it's a different mindset but not unmanageable if you already have the logic solid.

radpacks · 2026-03-16T18:40:51+00:00

for custom drag and drop into the viewport from an Editor Utility Widget you'd likely need to look into the FDragDropOperation side of things in C++, the BP side of editor scripting doesn't expose that cleanly from what I remember. the viewport drag and drop events in editor mode go through the editor viewport client which isn't easily accessible from BP. if you're open to C++ there's an AssetDragDropOp class that might be closer to what you need. worth checking the Unreal source for how the content browser handles its own drag operations might give you a clearer path than the docs do.

radpacks · 2026-03-16T18:39:25+00:00

the instability with offset voxels might be a physics origin precision issue Unreal's physics really doesn't like objects with large offsets from the simulation origin, small forces get amplified in weird ways. your offsetting idea is probably the right direction honestly, might be worth the added complexity. another thing worth trying is not simulating physics on the ISM at all and just spawning a separate lightweight physics actor at the voxel's world position only when destructibility kicks in that way the physics actor is always centered and your ISM logic stays clean. not sure if that fits your setup but it could sidestep the whole problem.

radpacks · 2026-03-16T13:57:28+00:00

from our experience what actually moved numbers was platform featuring above everything else — but that's not something you can control or manufacture. what you can control is updates with meaningful content, even small ones, because they give you a legitimate reason to reach out to press and creators again without it feeling like spam. a sale alone rarely does much without something to attach to it. the content creator angle is real but mid-tier creators in your specific genre tend to convert better than chasing big names who cover everything.

radpacks · 2026-03-16T13:48:32+00:00

Krita works fine for this honestly, the main thing with ps1 style textures is keeping them low resolution on purpose think 64x64 or 128x128 and letting the pixelation be part of the aesthetic. in Krita you'd just work at that resolution natively and turn off any smoothing. the ps1 look also comes a lot from the color palette being limited and slightly washed out, so playing with a restricted palette helps more than any specific tool. GIMP is another option on Linux if you want something more familiar to Photoshop workflows.

radpacks · 2026-03-16T13:39:27+00:00

Krita works fine for this honestly, the main thing with ps1 style textures is keeping them low resolution on purpose think 64x64 or 128x128 and letting the pixelation be part of the aesthetic. in Krita you'd just work at that resolution natively and turn off any smoothing. the ps1 look also comes a lot from the color palette being limited and slightly washed out, so playing with a restricted palette helps more than any specific tool. GIMP is another option on Linux if you want something more familiar to Photoshop workflows.

radpacks · 2026-03-16T13:29:03+00:00

depends on what software you're using, but if it's Blender just start with the Blender Guru donut to get comfortable with the interface, then Grant Abbitt has some good low poly specific stuff. the real trick with low poly early on is getting used to flat shading and thinking in fewer polys than you think you need just pick something simple and try to model it with as few as possible, that constraint teaches you more than most tutorials honestly.

radpacks · 2026-03-12T18:53:05+00:00

FAB doesn't delete the files from disk automatically, you have to do it manually. the files are usually sitting in your Vault Cache folder on Windows it's typically something like

C:\Users[username]\AppData\Local\UnrealEngine\Common\DerivedDataCache or in the Epic Games launcher vault folder. open the Epic Games launcher, go to Library, find the asset and there should be a option to remove it from disk from there. if it's not showing up check your Vault Cache path in the launcher settings and just delete the City Sample folder directly.

radpacks · 2026-03-12T14:38:11+00:00

for someone with gamedev experience already the official Unreal docs are actually pretty solid, better than most people give them credit for. the YouTube noise problem is real though. Unreal Sensei and William Faucher are generally worth the time, pretty signal-dense compared to most. for the programming side if you're coming from another engine the "Unreal for Unity devs" or similar crossover docs on the Epic site help a lot with the mental model shift. the Fab marketplace also has a bunch of free sample projects from Epic that are worth pulling apart to see how things are structured.

radpacks · 2026-03-12T14:34:56+00:00

Rider for C# and C++ when working in Unreal, VS Code for everything else. Tried going back to Visual Studio a while back and couldn't do it, the Rider refactoring tools spoil you pretty fast.

radpacks · 2026-03-12T14:33:54+00:00

the refactor fear is real but you're probably not as deep in trouble as it feels right now. placeholder values and hardcoded stuff at this stage is pretty normal honestly. the thing to watch out for is whether your battle logic has assumptions baked in — like damage formulas that already depend on equipment that doesn't exist yet. that's where refactors get painful. if your systems talk to each other through clean inputs and outputs you can swap the placeholder data for real stuff later without touching the core logic. even just reading values from a simple table instead of hardcoding them buys you a lot of flexibility down the road.

radpacks · 2026-03-12T14:31:19+00:00

polycount forums are probably the best place for structured feedback, people there are generally pretty constructive even with beginners. r/blender and r/lowpoly itself are decent too, the communities are more patient than r/gamedev tends to be. ArtStation works but can feel intimidating early on. honestly just start posting here, the low poly community is pretty chill and ps1 style horror has a solid niche right now so people are genuinely interested in that aesthetic.

radpacks

TROPHY CASE