Instanced foliage actor fps question

I’ve got an instanced foliage actor thats using meshes from the kite demo, it seems to be badly affecting my game fps esp on low end hardware, how can I reduce this.

Atm I’m hitting 10 fps and obviously need to triple that

One of the great things about the foliage system (foliage tool) in UE4 is that it uses Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes. What this system does is split up the meshes into a hierarchy, cull them together with their group, and then only use one draw call per group. This is very fast compared to directly placing static mesh trees in your map.

The trees in the KitDemo are not fast. They are not optimized well at all. To start with, they need a lot of tweaking to their LOD settings. This will get you a massive increase in fps.

I have used 100’s of KitDemo trees on a map and still get over 160 fps. But for maximum performance you will want to create your own optimized foliage. Try to minimize the number of verts per LOD and try to LOD down as fast as you can without pop. We try to shoot for LOD’s of 40k, 20k, 10k, billboard for most trees.

The current game I am working on has over 1,000 trees that look better than the KiteDemo trees and are all visible at once. I get close to 150 fps when putting all the trees in my field of view. So it can be done, it just takes a lot of optimization work.

Because I’m an idiot can you please show me exactly how to do this, I’d really appreciate it as I I’ve already missed a deadline to demo the game.