1.4 (Unreal Engine 4.10)

Major changes

  • Important - As from 4.11 MassiveLOD tool will be deprecated. Users should start using HLOD instead. A warning text at top of MassiveLOD widget has been added as well.
  • New - Updated SimplygonSDK to 7.0.1471
  • New - Material instances (MI) are now generated instead of new materials for each material bake. The MI's parent material is what we called a template material and is generated with respect to the materials attributes enabled for casting. E.g if you check basecolor and normal a new material template will be generated based on those channels. So if you bake materials for 10 meshes using basecolor and normals only that material template will be used.
  • New - Support to bake pre-baked ambient occlusion (AO mask). In order to use it, BakeVertexData and BakeActorData needs to be enabled.
  • New - Support to bake ambient occlusion material attribute. In order to use it, ambient occlusion needs to be enabled in material settings.

Other changes

  • New - Context menu entry for LODGroups in Content Browser.
  • New - Simplygon screen size to deviation conversion for Skeletal and static mesh LODs.
  • New - Merging multiple monochrome ("mask") textures into 3-channel RGB textures. Generalized approach earlier used for "MSR" textures. All mask textures are rendered with linear gamma now.
  • New - Implemented OptimizeFlattenMaterialForGeometry in SimplygonMeshReduction. This function optimizes FFlattenMaterial replacing single-color textures with constants (textures containing a single FColor sample). Used for all material LOD types.
  • New - Implemented renderer of material's UV using filling with single color. Used for optimization: when rendering property which has no connected expressions, not compiling a shader for it anymore, but using this renderer with predefined constant instead.
  • Fix - BakeVertexData in MassiveLOD settings is now "on" by default.
  • Fix - Base color is enabled by default in Massive LOD widget.
  • Fix - Static mesh vertex colors are now properly used through LODs.
  • Fix - Bone reduction has been re-enabled with a simple UI interface where you can choose bone reduction ratio.
  • Fix - Properly selecting MassiveLOD actor after creation. Previous code didn't change object properties panel, it displayed properties of original actor(s).
  • Fix - SetMaterialChannelData() fixes for 1x1 (1-sample) textures. Older code used InSGMaterial->SetColorRGB() which forces to use sRGB for that value (if sRGB is on in channel's settings).
  • Fix - Fixed issue when making Massive LOD for multiple instances of the same mesh, which has UVs outside of 0..1 range and no needs for vertex data baking. In that case, TexCoordBounds were generated only for the first actor.
  • Fix - In some conditions changing LOD parameters in static mesh editor didn't force engine to rebuild LOD.
  • Optimization - Holding compiled shader for MaterialInstance's parent in memory until all instances which use this material will be rendered.
  • Optimization - Combining multiple FFlattenMaterial objects for single mesh into a single FFlattenMaterial when baking materials for a mesh with generated UVs.

Known issues

  • Baking materials using infiltrator character (CAR_Export) and matinee character (Trooper_Main) does not produce expected results.
  • Reimporting static meshes will not trigger a proper LOD rebuild.