Suggested Improvements: 1) You can make rotation with Tick frame-independent by multiplying the Rotator by the Tick event's DeltaSeconds. We've implemented this in the Github source code.
When you want to draw the same mesh many times, I recommend using Instanced Static Mesh Component instead of having an actor for each. It renders a single mesh on multiple positions
First and foremost an excellent video! Very thorough! It's not entirely true that you can't do anything about the shadow. You can give the shadow a custom shadow stencil and conceivably you could rotate that stencil. It'll never be as precise as actually casting the shadow, but for simple shapes (like a coin) you can probably cheaply model the appearance from some uv coords.
how do you get his to rotate around the local axis? I have a propeller I want to spin, but it is not perfectly aligned in X,Y, or Z. It's tilted at 45 degrees. I can easily make it a child of a Scene Component, so it only rotates in Y, but the Material method does not see it this way. It still rotates it in World Y. I tried ObjectPiviotPoint, ComponentPivotLocal, Local, and I'm running out of choices.
On the NormalizedRotationAxis of the RotateAboutAxis material node, you'll want to specify a normalized (i.e. magnitude of 1) vector representing the axis you want the propeller to spin around. In the video, we're using a vector that represents a line pointing straight up in the Z axis (0,0,1). For your example of a 45 degree angle, you can try (0,0.707,0.707) or different combinations, as 0.707 is sin(45 degrees) and cos(45 degrees).
@@PendingKill yea... this still only gets me a fixed rotation. Meaning, I would have to know the object's angle in the game. I am randomly spawning fans, in a room. so... 1) trying to get the fan blade to face the correct direction. 2) (advanced) trying to get the fan blade to face the correct direction, if I have a ossolating fan. currently, If I look at the fan in the blueprint, it looks fine, but once I place it in the scene, it is locked aligned to XYZ that was set in the blue print, and it ignores the rotation of the actor in the scene.
@@PendingKill Got it to work. I had some help on a discord forum. Adding 2 nodes in the material that enter the RotateAboutAxis/NormalizedRotationAxis (input). Take the colored XYZ(RGB) node, plug it into a Normalize node. Add a ObjectOrientation Node. Add RotateVector node.
@@ZimCrusher Glad you figured it out! The ObjectOrientation node seems like the key to get it to rotate around arbitrarily placed objects in the scene. Thanks for writing this up, hopefully others will find it useful.
I wonder how this test would differ if you used an instanced static mesh over regular static meshes. My guess is performance would probably increase dramatically for all of your tests
Have you done any testing in UE5.3? I've been dwelling in material to create some animation, to save on performance. Would be nice to know if there is a point to it still or if it's outdated nowadays. Like how would this compare to vertex animation?
Wow, very great optimization tutorial! It's very interesting to optimize games, thanks! Hope you will do more tutorials for optimization and possible issues like shadows but in very optimized material
Thanks! I believe that a C++ implementation would follow a very similar structure, especially for the Rotating Movement component. Of course, you wouldn't need C++ for the Material method.
I was under the assumption that static mesh components in actors were auto instanced. Other than that, it would be interesting to see how instanced static meshes would work with.
Typically they are auto-instanced as long as they're not moving. But once we add the Rotating Movement component or rotate the actor manually on tick, the auto-instancing no longer occurs.
i wanna add if u use the material static mesh on BP - but set it as static not movable - the engine should realise it as instance (no more draw call for eatch)- and should get better performance ---- i test with another thing not ur test
Seriously. I have an actor that is my base pick up actor, and I turned tick off. My FPS stayed 120 FPS with over 300 actors on screen. Turned tick back on and it halved my FPS. So the material is really the best option.
This obviously doesnt matter, but for reference what are the specs of the pc used for these tests? Particularly cpu/gpu setup Great info though, and excellently presented!
@@PendingKill Oh my the nostalgia, the FX-8350! how come you still run that bad boy in the year 2020? haha, with the more recent ryzen cpu's being relatively cheap that is. (unless you actually own two rigs.) I used to have one aswell. It was a beast back when it was released!
@@Skyflairl2p Haha it's served us well, though we're planning to upgrade that one soon :) the other machine we have is a Ryzen 3600 + RTX 2080. And yeah 8 cores was a flex back in the day.
Well, seems like once you put it into a blueprint, UE will treat it as separate objects and won't do auto-instancing with the static meshes. However, you're still avoiding having to rotate an object every frame, so it's substantially cheaper compared to using the RotatingMovement component (or any of the other non-shader rotation methods we discussed)
It is kinda weird that less FPS = slower rotation when using Tick... If you multiplied your RotationRate by DeltaTime, this shouldn't have been a problem.
Suggested Improvements:
1) You can make rotation with Tick frame-independent by multiplying the Rotator by the Tick event's DeltaSeconds. We've implemented this in the Github source code.
When you want to draw the same mesh many times, I recommend using Instanced Static Mesh Component instead of having an actor for each. It renders a single mesh on multiple positions
Yes, but to test framerates, this is a better solution
That's not going to work if you want to use this for pick ups.
Great video, even with seeing this through out my dev time it's nice to see the hard numbers. Definitely a reality check.
Thank you! We'll be incorporating more of these stats in our tutorials.
First and foremost an excellent video! Very thorough!
It's not entirely true that you can't do anything about the shadow. You can give the shadow a custom shadow stencil and conceivably you could rotate that stencil. It'll never be as precise as actually casting the shadow, but for simple shapes (like a coin) you can probably cheaply model the appearance from some uv coords.
Great great . Thank you soo much for this episode. Want more optimization result comparing videos like this one.
Good job defenitly learned something ;)
Thank you!
Do the normals also need to be rotated when using a material-based rotation?
That is exacly why you multiply the delta time with rotation angle when using event tick 🤣
Nvm, you wrote that in the comments
Or, just don't use tick whenever possible because it is still the worst performer here.
how do you get his to rotate around the local axis?
I have a propeller I want to spin, but it is not perfectly aligned in X,Y, or Z. It's tilted at 45 degrees.
I can easily make it a child of a Scene Component, so it only rotates in Y, but the Material method does not see it this way. It still rotates it in World Y.
I tried ObjectPiviotPoint, ComponentPivotLocal, Local, and I'm running out of choices.
On the NormalizedRotationAxis of the RotateAboutAxis material node, you'll want to specify a normalized (i.e. magnitude of 1) vector representing the axis you want the propeller to spin around. In the video, we're using a vector that represents a line pointing straight up in the Z axis (0,0,1). For your example of a 45 degree angle, you can try (0,0.707,0.707) or different combinations, as 0.707 is sin(45 degrees) and cos(45 degrees).
@@PendingKill yea... this still only gets me a fixed rotation.
Meaning, I would have to know the object's angle in the game.
I am randomly spawning fans, in a room.
so... 1) trying to get the fan blade to face the correct direction.
2) (advanced) trying to get the fan blade to face the correct direction, if I have a ossolating fan.
currently, If I look at the fan in the blueprint, it looks fine, but once I place it in the scene, it is locked aligned to XYZ that was set in the blue print, and it ignores the rotation of the actor in the scene.
@@PendingKill Got it to work. I had some help on a discord forum.
Adding 2 nodes in the material that enter the RotateAboutAxis/NormalizedRotationAxis (input).
Take the colored XYZ(RGB) node, plug it into a Normalize node.
Add a ObjectOrientation Node.
Add RotateVector node.
@@ZimCrusher Glad you figured it out! The ObjectOrientation node seems like the key to get it to rotate around arbitrarily placed objects in the scene. Thanks for writing this up, hopefully others will find it useful.
You made my day! Thanks!
I wonder how this test would differ if you used an instanced static mesh over regular static meshes. My guess is performance would probably increase dramatically for all of your tests
Have you done any testing in UE5.3? I've been dwelling in material to create some animation, to save on performance. Would be nice to know if there is a point to it still or if it's outdated nowadays. Like how would this compare to vertex animation?
"omg these material-based coins are much faster to render!"
of course they are, you don't spend 25ms per frame computing dynamic shadows anymore!
It would be nice to see how much the shadows cost
@@legacythegame We'll try to cover shadows in a future video!
Really cool!
Would be good idea disable coins shadows and fake the shadow with a texture rotation on stamps.
Subscribed after watching that intro
really great tutorial, thanks! subbed
Great new channel, please make more tutorials! : )
Thank you!
Wow, very great optimization tutorial! It's very interesting to optimize games, thanks! Hope you will do more tutorials for optimization and possible issues like shadows but in very optimized material
Good stuff, follow up video on a C++ implementation?
Thanks! I believe that a C++ implementation would follow a very similar structure, especially for the Rotating Movement component. Of course, you wouldn't need C++ for the Material method.
why do the objects have a wobble? even in the preview with the sphere you can see that the sphere isnt maintaining its position perfectly
Why don't you try an instantiated static meshes?
forgot to compare the "rotating movement" component. which is a native c++ component for rotating objects.
Great video! please make more tutorials!!
I was under the assumption that static mesh components in actors were auto instanced.
Other than that, it would be interesting to see how instanced static meshes would work with.
Typically they are auto-instanced as long as they're not moving. But once we add the Rotating Movement component or rotate the actor manually on tick, the auto-instancing no longer occurs.
i wanna add if u use the material static mesh on BP - but set it as static not movable - the engine should realise it as instance (no more draw call for eatch)- and should get better performance ---- i test with another thing not ur test
René Borrero Why use any of those methods when you can just make a simple animation for it. Also are these copies you made instanced?
so i can use it for all my updates (tick) functions?
Also, you should have tested Timelines and rotation lerps
was about to type that
Could've also done a recursive re-route with a delay but hey...
Great Video! .... Thx for this
Thank you!
Did you turn tick off when you put the material in the actor?
Seriously. I have an actor that is my base pick up actor, and I turned tick off. My FPS stayed 120 FPS with over 300 actors on screen. Turned tick back on and it halved my FPS. So the material is really the best option.
Now, what do I have to do If I want hundreds of coins that one can pickup when they're not actors?
How to use a random value for the rotation rate with Rotation Movement Component ??
This obviously doesnt matter, but for reference what are the specs of the pc used for these tests? Particularly cpu/gpu setup
Great info though, and excellently presented!
Thank you for the kind words! These tests were done on a somewhat dated machine, with an AMD FX-8350 processor and R9 380 GPU.
@@PendingKill Oh my the nostalgia, the FX-8350! how come you still run that bad boy in the year 2020? haha, with the more recent ryzen cpu's being relatively cheap that is. (unless you actually own two rigs.) I used to have one aswell. It was a beast back when it was released!
@@Skyflairl2p Haha it's served us well, though we're planning to upgrade that one soon :) the other machine we have is a Ryzen 3600 + RTX 2080. And yeah 8 cores was a flex back in the day.
Wait, so shader based rotation isn't good anymore if it's inside a BP?
Well, seems like once you put it into a blueprint, UE will treat it as separate objects and won't do auto-instancing with the static meshes. However, you're still avoiding having to rotate an object every frame, so it's substantially cheaper compared to using the RotatingMovement component (or any of the other non-shader rotation methods we discussed)
hmm very interesting
dude. you pro
What about a timeline?
Yes more please, i'll even subscribe to the channel
I hoped the material wasn't the best. It is such a pain to code complex behavior without a graph
so timers not that good in optimized it's any way = event tick!
so witch better optimized method?
Doing it in the material is the fastest!
@@PendingKill but shadow not working. how i stop cast shadow on one specified component?
@@littledemo3605 I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to do, but you can try unchecking the Cast Shadows checkbox on the rotating actor.
умножь значение повората на дельта секунды, и тогда кадры в секунду не будут влиять на скорость поворота.
It is kinda weird that less FPS = slower rotation when using Tick... If you multiplied your RotationRate by DeltaTime, this shouldn't have been a problem.