DFGI disabled/broken on meshes painted by foliage tool?

Hey all,
been scratching my head about this for a few weeks now. I have a landscape that’s been populated with trees & grass by the foliage tool. I’m also running a master build with DFGI but have been running into the following problem:

meshes placed using the foliage tool don’t seem to receive DFGI/shadowing (not sure quite what’s disappearing) when in play mode. The same meshes when placed manually work just fine in regards to lighting.

The following picture shows the problem: the tree on the left has been placed by the foliage tool & lacks proper shadowing/lighting, meanwhile the tree on the right looks just fine due to it having been placed manually.

I’ve checked the option inside the foliage tool so that the meshes in question are to be effected by DF. Both trees look correct in-editor, so I’m pretty sure there is nothing wrong with the meshes & their setup.

Anyone have an idea how to fix this? Is this a bug? (and if so is there any way around it?) Starting to get a little desperate as this is my thesis project & I really don’t want to have to manually place 10.000+ meshes manually with corresponding variations…

In advance thanks!

Hi Ravneson,

Thank you for the report. I was able to reproduce this in our latest internal build of 4.8 with foliage instances. It has been reported with UE-14115.

As an aside, this is directly affecting any Distance Fields (DFSS, DFAO, DFGI) working with the foliage tool.

Once there is an update I will be sure to post back here. I do not have a time frame for when this will be though.

Thank you!

Tim