Virtual Textures in Unreal Engine optimize memory by streaming only the visible and necessary parts of large textures as "tiles”. This reduces GPU memory usage, improves performance, allows for larger and more detailed textures, minimizes streaming hitches, and gives artists more freedom.
When Virtual Textures support is enabled in Project Settings, MetaHuman Creator makes use of the feature for textures of skin material applied in both the Face and Body.
Virtual Texture support inside MetaHuman Creator can be disabled in Project Settings by disabling Use Virtual Textures.
When Use Virtual Textures is enabled, the viewport displays an extra entry informing you if Virtual Textures are actually being used or not. If Virtual Textures are not supported by one of the enabled platforms your project is targeting, Virtual Textures in MetaHuman Creator will be disabled.
Since the skin tone can be updated at any time, before downloading texture sources, only the Body material will use Virtual Textures. After downloading texture sources, both Face and Body materials take full advantage of Virtual Textures within MetaHuman Creator
Texture Overrides
When using Texture Overrides with Virtual Texture support enabled, it's crucial to ensure that any textures used with virtual texture samplers within a material are also marked as virtual. This allows them to load correctly and be assigned to the appropriate parameters in the material instances.
The following textures must be virtual when using Textures Overrides with Virtual Texture support enabled:
| Texture Group | Needs to be Virtual |
|---|---|
Face |
|
Body |
|
Assembly
When Virtual Texture support is enabled for a MetaHuman, material instances and textures will be suffixed with _VT to prevent conflicts with existing textures. This convention ensures proper asset management and prevents rendering issues that could arise from name collisions, ultimately streamlining the development process for MetaHuman integration.