A quick guide on the Foliage system. (WIP)

I was not able to emediatly find a guide on how this operates so, i figured i would post this. (Very WIPish)

This is a quick guide on how to use the foliage painter that is currently used, as it has a couple added settings. Currently this is somewhere around the bare minimum to get it working. (This assumes that you have a basic knowledge of the software)

First open the foliage module, and select Paint. Once paint is selected, find your static mesh and drag it into the field.


Once the static mesh has loaded, the current settings require a shared asset or “SM_Settings” asset to be added with the foliage.
Do this by locating the model’s SM_Settings and adding it to the"useInstancedFoliageSettings"

After doing this, you should be able to paint the foliage onto the terrain.

Awesome to see new modders already contributing to the community! Great job! Adding this to the info/useful links thread :stuck_out_tongue:

Not sure if you can help and if I should be asking in here but thought other people might be getting the same issue…

When I use the foliage system like you mention above my LOD settings on the foliage mean I have to be right next to them for them to be using the high detailed version. Even if im standing 10 meters away from them they are just blocky messes. Any idea what settings I need to change for that?

Thanks in advance!

This is to save on performance in the ADK I’m pretty sure (it only happens in the ADK correct?). Otherwise it has to do with the LOD’s not being setup. One of the two :stuck_out_tongue:

Do you mean compared to the normal Unreal Engine? I actually haven’t used any LOD meshes before but I thought each tree/bush would be setup the same as the standard game for ARK. Even if I load the test map its the same.

The bush meshes do have 3 different LOD settings on them it seems and i tried playing around with the settings on there but I couldn’t get it to work, might not have been doing it right though. In the end I just removed all but the most detailed one and that works for now. I’m only building a small level anyway.

Thanks for the help.