4.5.1 -> 4.7 placing foliage very slow

I have a map I’m working on with 4.5.1 which has a massive amount of grass meshes (placed using the foliage tools). I have around a million instances between all different meshes in the scene.

After updating to 4.7 I got a great performance boost (a massive 40 FPS gain… hurray!) BUT now placing/deleting additional meshes using the foliage tool is extraordinarily slow. When trying to add additional meshes using the paint tool (painting/erasing foliage), the editor slows down to the point of almost freezing.

My scene has this amount of meshes in the foliage tool:

Mesh1: Instance count = 370,000

Mesh2: Instance count = 216,000

Mesh3: Instance count = 329,000

Mesh4: Instance count = 25,000

Mesh5: Instance count = 25,000

I was going to move on to working with 4.7 preview, but seeing how slow placing meshes is, I’d rather stay at 4.5.1. Is this something that plans on being fixed for the definitive 4.7 version?

With how slow placement is I could only imagine moving on if I’m sure I won’t be editing the foliage anymore…

this is a known problem i have this as well i try to place massive amount of foliage and it takes forever the only hope you have is to slow down the placing of poliage and decrease the brush radius, and density. for some reason the editor gets slower for some reason and stays that way until your restart it so try saving then restarting the editor when it gets slow

I have 4.7 preview 2. I tried painting additional foliage while selecting only one of the meshes and it isn’t that slow.

However the problem is that when painting I always do so with at least 3 unique meshes selected at the same time and here is where it really slows down (to a point I cannot work anymore). This wan’t an issue in 4.5.1.

Hi cbordeu,

I have great news! This seems to have been fixed as of the 4.7 preview 2 which should be available to you. While you may still experience some FPS drop due to the sheer amount of content being rendered, the FPS should not drop nearly as much or as quickly. I stayed at a constant 60 FPS while testing when using a 63x63 landscape and, with standard settings (100 density in a 0.0 radius) on the largest brush available via the slider and 1.0 tool strength. Filling the landscape took less than 10 seconds. If you use LODs and distance culling the framerate should not be negatively impacted overall.

Hi cbordeu,

I was able to reproduce this and have entered a bug report, UE-7504 to be assessed by the development staff.

Awesome! Thanks!

thank you very much for your help. much appreciated :slight_smile:
i will try the 4.7 update