Robots Blossom – Project Update 018

I was able to add some landscaping detail to areas that will be in the camera view for my animated short. I also added grass using the Foliage tool in Unreal Engine 5.

Today’s progress was slowed when I ran into ‘Texture Streaming Pool Over budget’ error which isn’t too much of a big deal to resolve. I mean, who hasn’t had that problem, right? Here’s a great tip sheet from Stefan Perales with a couple of ways to resolve this issue. I chose to optimize all my Quixel Megascans textures. Of course, I went for the highest quality resolution when I originally downloaded the assets from Quixel Bridge. I know better than to download higher resolution assets than I need but I did it anyway 🙁 I thought I might not run into the streaming pool issue since I’m not using that many assets for my small scene. But I did run into it. Now back to the solution…I selected all of my textures in the UE5 Content Browser and used the Bulk Edit via Property Matrix tool to change all the texture resolutions at the same time. Mistake. It took a lot longer than I had expected for my system to process the change from 8k to 4k. Maybe even an hour. Optimizing the texture resolution in a batch max’d out my RAM usage. That’s the way it goes sometimes. At least the texture streaming issue is resolved. Quick reminder, my PC specs are AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3975WX 3.5GHz 32 Core 280W, GeForce RTX 3090, 256 DDR4 RAM. 

The screenshot below is an overview shot of a portion of my landscape using the beautiful Cherry Blossom Trees from Naked Singularity in my Working Lighting Level.

From the start of this project, I have been of the mindset of doing the least amount needed to keep the project moving forward. In other words, don’t build a lavish environment if you are only going to use a small portion of it. Even with this mindset, I still ended up creating 2-3x the amount of landscaping I needed.