Foliage and Instanced Static Mesh

[DjSt3rios]

I am working on a survival game, and I’ve been using foliage to place trees, and when a player tries to chop it, it replaces the foliage tree with a blueprint tree. While it works quite well, it gets a bit complicated. I was wondering if there is an easier way of doing this. I noticed there is a “Instanced Static Mesh” in the blueprint editor, could I use this to create the tree’s and keep a good performance? As far as I know using the foliage tool is better performance-wise, right?

[DjSt3rios]

Bumping the thread.

[mid_gen]

AFAIK the foliage tool is just a painting tool for placing instanced static meshes…so you’ll not see any functional difference, except that you’ll have to place all the instanced meshes yourself.

[DjSt3rios]

Thanks! I will give it a try

[John_Alcatraz]

@mid_gen;636818

AFAIK the foliage tool is just a painting tool for placing instanced static meshes…so you’ll not see any functional difference, except that you’ll have to place all the instanced meshes yourself.

Foliage tool uses hierarchical instanced static mesh components (HISMCs) since the regular ISMC can not do LOD per instance and you need LOD for foliage.

[DjSt3rios]

@John Alcatraz;637082

Foliage tool uses hierarchical instanced static mesh components (HISMCs) since the regular ISMC can not do LOD per instance and you need LOD for foliage.

A bit confused here. So it’s not exactly the same, but if I had LOD for my trees/rocks it would be almost the same?

[Jamendxman3]

@DjSt3rios;637332

A bit confused here. So it’s not exactly the same, but if I had LOD for my trees/rocks it would be almost the same?

HISMCs have the same function as ISMCs, but they support LODs per instance, as in individual foliage instances can blend between LODs. If you would like your instances to utilize LODs, you should go with HISMCs. The foliage tool pretty much just paints HISMCs onto an area.

[DjSt3rios]

@Jamendxman3;637335

HISMCs have the same function as ISMCs, but they support LODs per instance, as in individual foliage instances can blend between LODs. If you would like your instances to utilize LODs, you should go with HISMCs. The foliage tool pretty much just paints HISMCs onto an area.

I think I got the main idea. However I am a still a bit confused, since I will only use 1 instance per blueprint, won’t it be the same as a static mesh with LODs? (Performance wise)

[Jamendxman3]

@DjSt3rios;637345

I think I got the main idea. However I am a still a bit confused, since I will only use 1 instance per blueprint, won’t it be the same as a static mesh with LODs? (Performance wise)

With 1 instance per component, it should actually be worse than just using a static mesh.

[DjSt3rios]

@Jamendxman3;637351

With 1 instance per component, it should actually be worse than just using a static mesh.

Thanks, going with a simple static mesh. Thanks man!

[ZAY1]

Hey there i too tried my hand at making a survival game the route i went was way different i used foliage actors and of course it lowered my FPS and i noticed that i couldn’t edit the cull distance of the foliage actors either so what i did was make a new foliage instance mesh component and instead of using a regular static mesh in the actor i used that and the foliage static mesh component i was able to edit the cull distance and thus saving a lot more resouces