I can’t seem to get the HLOD commandlet to generate LODs for foliage (either procedural foliage spawner foliage OR hand painted foliage from the foliage paint mode). I’ve tried all the different methods of assigning an HLOD layer, the HLOD commandlet finishes successfully, but no LODs are built.
If there’s a way to set the foliage as “Always Loaded” and just use the built in LOD for the foliage, I’m fine with doing that as well, but currently it seems to be locked to “Location” mode for World Partition loading.
Has anyone successfully used foliage with World Partition and gotten distant LOD working?
Something definitely changed in 5.1 making this not possible anymore!? There is no data layers list in the foliage editor as other people have suggested, whats going on?
I’d suggest converting from foliage to static mesh, merging the actors down manually at their lowest LOD within a level tile, and instantiating the new merged model as its own thing in its own data layer with appropriate distance.
Billboards probably won’t work right with nanite, but with nanite, there may not be a real need to use the lowest possible (billboard) LOD - you’d have to bench the scene/view as you need it to know for sure.
Either way, even with the hlod system, manual setups usually beats anything the epic team makes in all aspects. Particularly the fact that whatever you created won’t break when anything epic touches usually does…
I don’t think that would work right, or at least not how most people are using foliage for large worlds anyway.
The issue is that if you have a huge forest/forests and plants using HISMs (which foliage actors use under the hood), converting them to non-ISM static meshes either is simply not doable due to performance (good luck opening/dealing with a scene with millions of non-instanced static meshes like that) or if you’re saying to use them as an ISM, it returns to the problem which is that the HLOD generation simply does not pick them up.
So that’s not really a solution that is viable or useful unfortunately.
Ultimately the fix is for Epic to make their commandlet/HLOD build process correctly pick up and LOD the H/ISM components.
Maybe re-read what I wrote or even give it a whirl.
Seems clear you don’t have the first clue of how to peroprly manage large worlds/maps just by your assertions.
In regards as to how people use foliage, that depends. Around 70% of engine users are individuals without any experience in the creation of anything, probably around 40% don’t even know what a normal map is. Any solutions is probably not likely to help them anyway.
Around 10% are too lazy to be bothered implementing their own solution - to you and them, good luck waiting on epic to do anything.
Search the forums for how to properly generate hlods, someone shared a working solution with a really well explained situation of why it was busted. Its very possible adjusting the settings as they advice would get foliage to behave on its own.
I stilll suggest everyone thinks about how to make it work as they need for their own purposes instead of relying to the hlod or any other epic built system.
Do you have a link to the post? Afaik there are several problems, the most prominent one that existed in 5.0 was seemingly HLODs generating LOD0 of the landscape instead of a lower tri mesh, but this is fixed.
Besides that I feel like there are a million other things that might not work, ie. HLOD layers and the different layer types either don’t make any difference or it gets stuck in the building process (even with very simple test cases) and sometimes after baking the HLOD tiles are loading in randomly not according to the WP loading range leaving gaps and holes everywere (afaik this mostly happens if you start messing around with adding custom HLOD layers)
Can’t find a link at the moment, but ill check and share it if I can find it.
There are quite a few other things broken about it. Or maybe not broken as much as not well thought out. Or not currently working in pair with other systems.
Hower at least in 5 you can set up data layers (apparently not for foliage, so not sure on that).
In 4, you had to pretty much make your own manager/loading system and even extend it to perform some runtime draw call aggregation. Those custom systems have never stopped working for me (the engine did, but that’s besides the point i guess)
