Pretty straightforward. When I use the foliage tool to place grass, it’s unaffected by changes in indirect lighting. If I manually place grass meshes around the level, then set their ILCQ type to “volume” it looks great. Of course, placing these meshes by hand is laborious, so I’d like to be able to make the foliage tool use this lighting method. In both cases the meshes are lit dynamically, so is this possible?
Here’s an image to illustrate:
When you place them manually each foliage get their own sample of indirect light. But when you use foliage tool whole cluster use same value. You can still use ILCQ type volume and it will help but not as dramatically. You first need to make blueprint child type of foliage instanced static meshes and then you can make all rendering specific changes at there.
I think 4.12 have integrated pull request that allow landscape grass foliage to use landscape lightmaps.
Thanks for the reply, @Kalle_H. I’m not very experienced with blueprints, however. Can you expand a little on how exactly to do the ILCQ change? If I’m thinking about this correctly, I’d create the child blueprint, but I don’t know how I’d get the foliage painting tool to use it. Also, is this child blueprint of the actual Foliage Instanced Static Mesh actor/code asset, or the mesh assets I’m placing?