About the Low-poly style
Low-poly vegetation is the cheapest style to render and to ship.
- Flat shading: one normal per face gives the crisp faceted look; no normal maps.
- Colour lives in vertex colours (glTF COLOR_0), so there are no textures, no UV work and almost no video memory.
- Leaves are solid geometry, not alpha cards: no alpha testing and no transparent overdraw, which matters on mobile GPUs.
- One material can be shared by every model in the scene, so trees batch and instance easily.
- Typical budgets range from a few hundred to a couple of thousand triangles at LOD0.
A good fit for mobile, WebGL/WebGPU, VR, strategy, city builders and stylised indie games. In the engine, use a material that multiplies by vertex colour.
Using it in Unreal Engine
Unreal Engine 5 imports FBX, OBJ and glTF/GLB (through the Interchange framework).
- LODs: enable Import Mesh LODs for an FBX that contains LOD meshes, or add LOD1–LOD3 later in the Static Mesh Editor via LOD Import.
- Custom collision: FBX meshes named
UCX_<MeshName>are imported as convex collision. - Leaf materials: Blend Mode Masked, Two Sided, and the Two Sided Foliage shading model for light passing through leaves.
- Place trees with Foliage Mode or the PCG framework; foliage is rendered as instanced static meshes.
- Nanite supports masked materials since UE 5.1. Keep the classic LODs for mobile and other non-Nanite targets.
