Floating foliage? :I

anonymous_user_835d39031 · February 13, 2015, 11:48am

Hello everyone,

Any ideas on how to work around this? I thought it might be because of the slope angle but i haven tthe faintest clue on how to make the grass along properly along slopes. Some slopes, the grass is painted underneath the hill so it cannot be seen I have a couple of grass variants and I want them to blend gracefully along the slopes. Also want to make some extreme hills.

Any ideas on how to solve this?

Kind regards

Roel · February 13, 2015, 12:38pm

I think your pivot position is not in the right location, it should be in the bottom center of the grass.

anonymous_user_923c79df · February 13, 2015, 12:41pm

check for invisible collisions
set your quality settings to “epic”
as already mentioned, take a look at the pivot

anonymous_user_923c79df · February 13, 2015, 2:02pm

Hmm, strange → which engine version do you use so that I can test it? Also make sure that your collision thickness is on 16 → you can find it in the details panel of your landscape

anonymous_user_835d39031 · February 13, 2015, 1:55pm

Hey , ,

Thanks for the quick replies

I did have them at the centre but I forgot to freeze transform them ^^;

However i am still having issues…

1: The plants are going underneath the surface on some parts of the hills,
2 & 3: There is foliage here but it is beneath the surface
4: When i re-sculpt the land, the foliage pops back on top o.0

I find this kind of an issue as I prefer to sculpt my landscape in a certain way before I add foliage.
I think it is wrong that I have to ruin the surfaces just to get plants to pop back up, it doesn’t make sense to me

Any ideas?

Thanks for having a look.

anonymous_user_835d39031 · February 13, 2015, 3:10pm

hi .

i am using 4.5.1 ^^

anonymous_user_923c79df · February 13, 2015, 8:42pm

Just tested it and it should work without any problems → have you already “rebuild” everything? (light, geometry, path,…)

anonymous_user_835d39031 · February 14, 2015, 8:47am

the only way i can fix it is by just adjusting the landscape.

Btw do you know any good tutorials on trying to make my grass ‘look good’ XD

I feel they look horrible! and where do you set your quality settings to epic?

edit: found the epic quality thing XD

Cheers

anonymous_user_923c79df · February 14, 2015, 10:29am

In this thread you can find many good ways how you can make your grass better: Also take a look at the new foilage shading mode + I will release a free grass/vegetation pack in around 1-2 weeks. There you can also find some interesting materials [FREE] grass meshes - World Creation - Epic Developer Community Forums (old thread)

anonymous_user_835d39031 · February 14, 2015, 12:02pm

thank you for the tutorials, your grass looks very pretty, pretty much the results i am trying to achieve, i am gona finish reading this stuff up and try to get similar results before trying out your material

anonymous_user_835d39031 · February 14, 2015, 2:43pm

your grass renders beautifully but i noticed something odd?

when you turn the camera around 360, the grass turns white, is this intended or missing something?
EDIT: lol! nevermind realized it is the specularity of the sky, since the spec was flat it appears like that

these are my results using the same shader setup as yours. What do you think? ;o

only thing that bugs me right now is it gets all ugly when i get further from the camera, i am supposing this has to do with quality and draw distance. Do you know what I can look at to solve this?

anonymous_user_923c79df · February 14, 2015, 9:55pm

Looks really good! With the new shader mode in 4.7 it will look even better. I think you mean that the texture gets blurry over the distance? → play around with the mip map settings (double click on the texture - mip map) or change the texture streaming distance (how to disable texture blurring based on a camera distance form object? - Rendering - Epic Developer Community Forums)

anonymous_user_e5b88159 · November 8, 2015, 6:38pm

I know this is an older topic, but I was having this same issue on 4.9.0, 4.9.2, and in 4.10.0 preview 4. I can’t say about previous versions, but suspect it’s similar there as well. According to all the advice here, my settings were correct, but still I had spots where the grass was underneath the ground. I did figure out how to fix it though, so I thought I would share here. I found this post first while I was searching for info on the issue, so I suspect others may as well.

The solution I found: Select the landscape-> details → Landscape section → Collision Mip Level (right above Collision Thickness). Hovering says the smaller the number the more accurate. Default was 1, so I set it to 0. Grass now draws correctly and no longer underneath the landscape.

Hope this helps.

Blood_angel_40k · February 24, 2021, 10:11pm

Thank you , that was very useful information.

kjvermilion · October 23, 2021, 11:11am

I’m now in UE5.0EA and this solution works wonderful still. Thank you for this solution. Commenting so people know: you can change the collision mip level to any value and then back again and it still will be fixed, I guess it just updates foliage whenever you adjust that value.

jeffpardy6669991 · November 3, 2022, 3:35pm

Changing the mip level didnt work for me. Using the erosion tool fixes it. Huge time sink to fix though.

Origenic · November 6, 2024, 11:50pm

Sadly this is still an issue on sloped landscape, I tried everything mentioned but it still has the issue.

pezzott1 · November 6, 2024, 11:59pm

Have you tried the console command RecreateLandscapeCollision?

MostHost_LA · November 7, 2024, 12:46am

There is another one to use when you move the landacape that was removed in later versions but was important in .25/26 that I cannot find again.

But yes, the core problem is the collision.

What one can do to fix this is to move the pivot at the middle of the plant or cluster so they sink below the landscape anyway.
Then you use the material and vertex paint to move the tips of the leaves/cluster up on Z as much as you need.

Theoretically (because the engine is in such a pitiful state that to make this in practice you need time, patience, and miracles) you can even read a heightmap value from the RTV system to determine just “how high” the grass tips need to go.

And naturally, if you are able to do that, you can also manipulate the bottom of the plant to get a more accurate - material adjusted - position.

With the older engines, and without RTV, you can still get dynamic lenght grass going by utilizing the landacape paint layer paint value.
0 (no color) is no change 1 (full color) is full change.
If you assign values around 10cm (or unreal units) max, you get some ptetty nifty default effects at relatively low perromance impacts.

Worth mentioning is that if someone has the time to figure it out, a custom .usf with shader code that generates the leaves in clusters is going to work billions better than anything you do with instancing and meshes.
Its Rendering only, requires no modeling, and will outperform anything else you come up with while also looking a lot better than your avarage grass mesh;
An end result of this can be seen in Gost of Tsushima.

You can check out some optimizations and cool things that can be done using HLSL directly here:

Origenic · November 7, 2024, 2:16pm

yes I just tried but that didn’t fix it