I’m using Cesium tile sets exported from Agisoft Metashape and need an as photorealistic representation of the photogrammetry data set as possible. This is why I try to have the highest level of detail possible e.g. I have currently set the Maximum Screen Space Error to 1.0 and I have enabled "Enforce Culled Screen Space Error" etc.
Also I want to mark spots in a tile set using line trace by channel e.g. to measure the distance between two points.
Unfortunately it seems that if the level of detail is high, the line trace passes through the many small tiles. “Create Physics Meshes” is enabled.
Is this a known behavior in Cesium for Unreal? Is it something that has to be fixed by exporting the tilesets differently from Metashape or can it be fixed in Unreal?
Or would I just have to find a trade-off point between “high enough LoD” and “trace still hits everywhere”?
I have also tried using “Sphere Trace By Channel” with a (in this case) large radius of 100 but it still mostly passes through everything.
Cesium for Unreal discards triangles that are degenerate, according to the definition that Unreal itself uses. We found that if we didn’t do this and passed those triangles through to Unreal, then it would fail the physics mesh creation completely, and collisions with the entire tile would fail.
The code in Cesium for Unreal that discards these small triangles is here:
Thanks for your response. It’s awesome how active you are in this forum. Thank you for your work
I don’t know much about degenerate triangles. At which point do these triangles degenerate?
Is this something that’s depending on my Unreal Engine and Cesium for Unreal LoD and rendering settings?
Or are they already considered degenerate when the tiles are being exported from Metashape (in my case) and I could tweak the settings there?
Or is this something that just can’t be avoided if I want very high LoD with Cesium tiles?
I think the problem is that a) Metashape is creating a mesh with very small triangles, b) by setting the Max SSE low in Cesium for Unreal, you’re telling it to select a high-detail (and thus small-triangle) representation, c) Unreal’s physics engine has a rather unaccomodating view of degenerate triangles, declaring triangles degenerate when I might argue they’re just small.
I think it could be worthwhile to confirm that this is truly what’s happening, though. Perhaps set a breakpoint after the code in my first link above and compare the number of faces in faceRemap to the triangleCount. Is it discarding a lot of triangles?
Unfortunately my understanding of Visual Studio and C++ is very limited but I managed to get this debugging output for example. I haven’t found the correct settings yet for triangleCount to not be optimized away during debugging but since it’s defined above as int32 triangleCount = indices.Num() /3 and indices has length 432, I assume that all three of triangleCount length of triangles, and length of faceRemap are 144 at the breakpoint.
Stepping through to that breakpoint several times, the lengths/counts were always equal to each other.
I’m also getting these outputs. Could this have something to do with it?
[2023.10.23-11.37.49:286][ 65]LogStaticMesh: Warning: UStaticMesh::GetPhysicsTriMeshData: \\
CPU data not available on selected LOD (UseLODIndex=0, LODForCollision=0) \\
on 'StaticMesh /Game/WorldUEDPIE_0_CesiumGlobe.CesiumGlobe:PersistentLevel.Cesium3DTileset_1.CesiumGltfComponent_485.http://localhost:8000/densecloudtest_cesium/Data/b0/f30055.b3dm mesh 2 primitive 0.http://localhost:8000/densecloudtest_cesium/Data/b0/f30055.b3dm mesh 2 primitive 0'.
[2023.10.23-11.37.49:286][ 65]LogPhysics: Warning: UBodySetup::GetCookInfo: \\
ContainsPhysicsTriMeshData returned true, but GetPhysicsTriMeshData returned false. \\
This inconsistency should be fixed for asset '/Game/World/UEDPIE_0_CesiumGlobe.CesiumGlobe:PersistentLevel.Cesium3DTileset_1.CesiumGltfComponent_485.http://localhost:8000/densecloudtest_cesium/Data/b0/f30055.b3dm mesh 2 primitive 0.http://localhost:8000/densecloudtest_cesium/Data/b0/f30055.b3dm mesh 2 primitive 0'
I’m thinking for my use case I might just revert back to using FBX 3D models with Nanite instead of CesiumTiles and give the StaticMeshActors a CesiumGlobeAnchor component to place them in the Cesium World at the coordinates I know they have.
But looking at that code, it’s not obvious why we should be in there at all. Would you mind seting a breakpoint on the UE_LOG line linked above and share the call stack you’re seeing?
First of all: Please tell me if we reach a point where you no longer have the time, capacity, or patience to investigate this issue. I’m interested in getting it solved but as I said, I could also probably make my use case work with FBX.
This is the debug call stack that shows up immediately after loading into a level with one of the tilesets. (btw, it’s not just a single tile set, the behavior is the same for multiple. All of them have been generated with metashape, though)
Just for good measure I’ve let the tiles validator check the tileset, however I have not enough knowledge about 3D tiles to really interpret the output:
And these are the settings I used in metashape to build the tiled model. (Exporting with different tile sizes made no difference when it comes to the original issue of the line trace passing through so I decided to create the tilesets with as few separate files as possible.)
It appears that you have CreateNavCollision enabled on the tileset. And in UE 5.3, at least (or perhaps in all versions, I’m not sure), creating nav collision requires physics meshes. Because the physics meshes won’t exist yet at that point (they’re added a few lines below!), UE creates them automatically. And that fails, at least in some cases, because the source mesh data isn’t available on the CPU.
I think the solution is easy: move the call to CreateNavCollision after the code that adds the physics meshes and sets bCreatedPhysicsMeshes to true.
I’m not sure if that will help at all with your line traces, but I think it’s worth a try.
You should also consider turning off NavCollision if you’re not using it.
