How to set the spawn distance of the Procedural Foliage tool?

Hey,

To cut it short: How do I make my trees (using Procedural Foliage tool) unload at a set distance?

Back when I was using the foliage paint tool I was able to determine at what distance trees would load in and out of my level. When I started using the Procedural Foliage tool, I lost that ability. How do I make the trees in the far distance disappear? I’ve got a map at the size of 32.000km^2, so spawning every tree even while just spawning a set of tiles using World Composition is still a blow to my PC as it drops to 10-20 FPS. I’m using SpeedTree models with approximately 10k tris each.

What I’ve tried in order to make the performance better:

  1. I set the Culling distance in the FoliageType, which does not affect the distance at which the trees spawn.

  2. I tried spawning a Culling Volume, just to figure out that it unloads objects that are not shown on the screen, which is wonderful, but I need trees to disappear at a distance aswell.

Picture to represent what I’m working with.

This is just a small part of the landscape, making loading the whole landscape impossible due to performance. I’m considering making a smaller landscape in order to be able to load in every tile of the world at once without having a huge hit to the FPS, but that’s walking in the opposite direction of my game.

Looking forward to some response, cheers!

PS: I deleted my previous question as it was written in a hurry on my phone, and was undescriptive.

Hey,

Take a look at the foliage scalability ref . The proc foliage system should auto assign the items to foliage or if not i remember it being a dropdown to assign it as foliage in its scalability settings. I also think you can make foliage scalibility groups so that grass has separate to trees separate to bushes etc, all within the foliage spawner system. Think its in the foliage spawner volume for density, and the foliage asset for the in depth details. All going from memory so might not be correct.

The foliage scalability only affects the grass on my end (in the docs aswell).

The proc foliage tool does indeed auto assign the foliage types, making them FoliageInstancedStaticMeshComponents, if that’s what you’re refering to. The only setting under Scalability in the FoliageTypes is “Enable Density Scaling”, which is supposed to be better left unticked for performance.

The culling distance of the Grass Tool works perfectly, removing grass meshes that have hit the set culling distance; why doesn’t that occure with the proc foliage tool?

Thanks for the response Daniel :slight_smile:

I have the opposite problem. I get culling unless I get very close to trees. I can’t figure out how to have unlimited visibility (rendering) of trees.

I have the near and far Culling distances both set to Zero. If I put values in I still get the same display. I can’t seem to make any adjustments at all.

UE4 4.22.3