I have this problem (4.17.2): I have three landscape actors in my project, on two of them I’m not able to spawn or paint any foliage. I get this message: “unable to spawn instances. make sure a large enough surface exists within the volume”. I would really like to know how to get around this.
EDIT: some additional information: I converted two landscapes to staticmeshes just to see if that would change anything. Very interestingly the landscape I can’t place foliage on has a aprox size of 1x1x0 when exported. The other export has an aprox size of 1,579 x2,016 x 192 and I can paint and spawn foliage on that one. So the problem is basically that the engine sees a huge landscape as something with a size of 1x1x0. Very odd.
Hi ,
I was unable to reproduce this bug. Do you have World Composition enabled in the project? We’ll need additional information to be able to pinpoint the issue.
Hi ,
Thank you for your reply. It is a landscape from the “photorealistic landscape pack 4” from the epic marketplace. If you have acces to it you can try for yourself to paint foliage on island-a, or try to spawn foliage on it. If you don’t than I can send you the files.
Kind regards!
Do you have a custom collision setup? I had similar problem once, Turned out if I used custom collision channels, foliage painting could not detect my landscape.
Do you have a custom collision setup? I had similar problem once, Turned out if I used custom collision channels, foliage painting could not detect my landscape.
I think i find a solution:
in Procedural Foliage ,the default value of ‘Num Unique Tiles’ is 10, change it to 1 ,
and then make sure the scale of Procedural Foliage is bigger than one Tile size of your landscape.
I hope it will help you guys!
I had a similar problem in 4.18. I say similar rather than exactly the same as I didn’t try exporting my landscape like you did so I can’t be 100% sure I had the size issue, although my error message was the same. What fixed the error message for me was to import the lanscape via Tiled Landscape rather than creating each individual level and adding the landscape via heigtmap. When I originally did the latter I found that I could only spawn foliage on my landscape level that was positioned at 0,0 coordinates. If I moved the position of the landscape or tried painting foliage on the other levels it would give the same error message that you have. Once I imported the levels via tiled landscape it all just worked. Hope this helps.
I’m having almost an identical issue here. I’m using an imported Tiled Landscape. I was getting the same error message, I fixed the tile sizes and what not, hit resimulate and nothing shows up… not even the error message. When I paint the foliage only a couple logs show up on the landscape. I made it so foliage can be applied on top of static meshes just to check if the spawners were even working in the first place. They were, as all my buildings and other static meshes ended up growing a forest on top of them. I recently contacted the publisher of this asset too, but they’re at E3 at the moment. Is there a fix to this issue yet? Is it an engine bug?
Same here, even in 2019 on the 4.22 version. The sphere of painting foliage has disappeared. I can’t paint foliage on the landscape.
I did not tweak many things in the landscape and it was not imported. Strange. The suggestions above did not worked.
No choice than to delete landscape and made a new one in the same map. The foliage tool reappear.
I would advise to start putting some foliage before painting all your landscape layers just to be careful.
Hi, Same problem but I fix that. In my case problem was with “Placement” in Static Mesh Foliage, you can select on what Landscape Layers can spawn foliage. If you have different layers on landscape you can set to spawn ex: rocks on rock paint, plants, trees on dirt or grass paint etc. Problem was when I created new landscape I try to use same procedural foliage spawner that was maked for old one, after I removed all Inclusion Landscape Layers in Static Mesh Foliage all worked.
I do not know if you have figured it out yet, there is a solution I have discovered that did work for me. If you are using the ProceduralSpawner to place the trees on the landscape I can be of help here. First select the ProceduralSpawner you want to use, and under the Details tab select the Foliage Spawner and open it up. Once you have it open, you should see a listing of the Foliage Types and other items are want to use, so open one of the Foliage Types to open it up. Once it is open, click the down arrow at the bottom of the Placement section to open the listing of Inclusion and Exclusion Landscape Layers. What I had found here is to either create or simply remove the Inclusion Landscape Layers Array Elements and it then placed the Foliage to the landscape.
Bit late for a reply, but thanks to tech1187. Tried several things, but only his (her) solution worked. Basically, if the inclusion landscape layers is not set up correctly (or is but your actual landscape doesn’t match the criteria) the the PFS says no : )
I’m adding this in case anyone is searching for help with this:
It’s not obvious that you have to highlight the foliage thumbnails and RMB > Activate before the brush will show up in the viewport when using Paint foliage on landscape.
This may not be a problem if you are starting with a new Foliage, but you may come across this if you load a scene that already has instanced foliage painted and you want to continue adding more.
From reddit: u/aeroson My issue was that the foliage brushes were deactivated So I had to select and activate them Imgur: The magic of the Internet
Trying this with World Partition, always fails with the Unable to Spawn Instances error. Changed settings with and without included layers, or different (very small) tile sizes.
