To give even more control with the Procedural Foliage Volume, it would be great if you could add different meshes and/or shaders for the different ‘ages’ of the foliage instance.
For instance, I have a model of a tree which has 5 meshes for the different ages of the tree (0, 25, 50, 75 & 100% age).
If there was some way you could allow for Foliage Type to support ‘ages’ kinda like how the LOD for a static mesh works.
So in my example above, I would specify 5 ‘ages’ 0% old - 100% old and then 3 in between (this would be dynamic divided as per amount of ages required).
Then, when the Procedural Foliage Volume is simulating, it could take into account the Max Initial Age and Max Age (which I presume is just how the scaling is decided), a different mesh would be selected based on the age of that particular ‘seed’.
Currently, I have to create 5 different Foliage Types for my 5 trees and they group together in ages - as you would expect because they are being treated as a different spices.
For smaller foliage, maybe just the ability to specify a different shader or shader instance with decaying textures or effect instructions for older foliage rather than relying on World Position and masking for random placement of ageing species.
This might sound trivial but the ability to populate large scale believable worlds is dependant on Procedural placement and this would go a step further to maturing this feature. A designer could get away with only providing a single ‘age’, but multiple ‘ages’ will see smaller/younger versions of the species on the peripheries of the clusters and that would look great!