# Limitations, Recommendations, Workarounds & Tips

# Loss in texture resolution (limitation)

Simplygon currently relies on material flattening to pre-bake the Unreal Engine material into an intermediate material. This is done using the material flattening process. This results in a new set of textures that are then used by Simplygon during its baking process. Since both material flattening and Simplygon using the same output resolution, which is usually lower than the source textures combined, this can results in slightly fuzzy looking textures if viewed at close distance. Ideally, material baking should be used for far away meshes.

# Distributed processing progress (limitation)

When using distributed asset building there is unfortunately no support for getting progress from FastBuild or Incredibuild. However, for Incredibuild builds you can use the monitoring application provided as part of the package.

# New UV generation limitation when separating trunk and foliage (limitation)

Currently, when using the Billboard Cloud Foliage Pipeline with the setting Separate Trunk and Foliage checked, the number of UV's on the source asset has to be less than MAX_STATIC_TEXCOORDS (where MAX_STATIC_TEXCOORDS is an engine constant, default set to 8). The reason for this is that these settings requires us to keep both the source UV's (for the kept trunk geometry) and generate a new set of UV's for the foliage part. These combined can't be larger than the maximum set of UV's allowed.

# LODGroup to LODRecipe Conversion (workaround)

LODGroup to LODRecipe conversion is not currently provided. However with python scripting available technical artist should have tools available to easily write a script to map LODGroups to LODRecipes.

We recommend that you flush your DDC (Derived Data Cache) when you've switched over to using Simplygon's LOD interfaces after having used Epic's built-in version. This is to make sure that no cached LOD data from before will override or interfere with Simplygon generated LODs. Once you are using Simplygon we recommend that you use LODRecipes to generate your LODs.

# Exporting scene and pipeline (tip)

If you are experiencing issues, you can enable debug settings in the project settings to help you (and us) to figure out the underlying problem. You go to Project Settings->Plugins->Simplygon plugin and enable Debug checkbox and Export pipeline and scene. This will allow you to export the scene and pipeline in the different Simplygon tools. The export path is ProjectDir/Intermediate/Simplygon by default but can be set in the project settings under Debug Path.

# Visualizing intermediate flattened textures (tip)

You can visualize the intermediate texture generated during material flattening process using the following console command. The textures are outputted to ProjectDir/Intermediate/MaterialBaking

MaterialBaking.SaveIntermediateTextures = 1

# Mass assign LODRecipes (tip)

The simplygon_helpers.py script provides users with methods to assign a LODRecipe to all Static and Skeletal meshes in a folder.

← Python Scripting Actor Merging →