Ah I wish this update would come out sooner. I spent the yesterday stripping down lots of instructions from the materials. Right now they run well on my end.
I think it’d be best if you could add more LODs in between. After you added static mesh trees as an update (Thanks!), each tree has a LOD0 about 35,000 Tris, LOD1 about 15,000 Tris, and LOD2 which is an X tree. In order to maintain smooth performance I have made the LOD2 appear very early (distance set to 0.99) otherwise 3 trees easily add up to +100,000 Tris. But even then having all the surrounding trees at ~15,000 Tris is still heavy so I have made LOD3 to also appear at a medium distance. Now the pop between this LOD2 and LOD3 are very obvious.
Btw, any ETA on your Redwood pack? 