Does anyone have any experience with rendering the city sample in a sequence? I’m trying to use the city sample as a backdrop but I want to hide some actors in it. I’ve gotten to the point where they will not render if the camera location is close to them, but whenever I’m doing an overhead shot, the hidden actors pop up again! I have the actors in a separate data layer that is unloaded, they are hidden in game, set to not spawn, but they still keep showing up in my wide shots.
The only solution I can think of is setting the level to disable streaming and delete the actors permanently but the only time I’ve tried that, my render immediately crashed. FML.
Does anyone have any insight into why this is happening? Is the only way to fix it to find a way to disable streaming, or is it a camera proximity issue affecting the culling, or something else? Any tips or experience would be greatly appreciated.
Have you tryed with set visibility instead spawn?
In every sequence I have, all actors are keyed to set visibility = false.
Even in test cameras I have done, the actors are always hidden when the camera is close and then at a certain distance, they will stream back in, no matter their visibility settings.
Is it the case that there are two actors for the things that pop in?
One for “distance mesh” and one for “close up actor?”
If so, you need to hide both the nearby and the far-away one.
It’s also possible that the same actor is rendering the two modes, but has some distance logic that turns the actor visible/invisible based on how the camera moves.
E g, the camera moves overhead, the actor re-calculates what meshes should be visible, and makes the distance mesh (and itself?) visible.
Same problem here. @jwatte, your answer makes a ton of sense, but i personally can’t find any references to a distance mesh. the only one i’ve found was generating mesh distance fields in the project editor, but turning that off didn’t change anything
mybe they are chaos actors that are spawning by bp
Hi, has anyone found a solution to this this? Spent hours last night discovering this problem and trying to find a way around it. Have been using Data Layers to hide (tryng to hide) groups of buildings. What I did discover was that static meshes obey the layer settings and stay hidden even when far away, but those buildings which are instanced static meshes/ blue prints do not, and are correctly hidden only when close to camera. Been trying to collapse buildings to static meshes/ tried changing a bunch of parameters to keep them hidden, even the mesh components within the BPs that make them but they still do not stay hidden.
Struggling with a similar issue. Buildings and structures keep disappearing in my renders.
Opposite problem to our one then 
I’d been wondering if it had to do with the spawning process via blueprints when the rendering starts, however, having tried a bunch more things such as destroying actor on sequencer keys and even at start up, adjusting life etc, did nothing. Just can’t hide - or delete- a building and have it stay hidden or deleted.
hey for anyone who comes to this thread in the future, i’m pretty sure this is a bug - there’s some coverage on youtube about it with non-city sample levels. It sucks that we’re on 5.2 and this is still happening, but hopefully it will be fixed in future versions.