Hey all so I’ve came on here to report a bug that I’ve been experiencing for a little while since the v40.00 update came out where the grass completely disappeared during my play session of UEFN but could clearly be seen working in the editor preview. The grass I’ve been using the whole time is landscape grass and I just do not know how I can possibly make it work again.
I’ve tried updating my driver’s, reinstalling them, reinstalled uefn and I had all settings set to Epic and the highest possible settings yet still nothing. The v40.10 update rolled out, took these pics of some bit of grass that appeared and when I relaunched the play session again after this, the grass completely disappeared again.
Please select what you are reporting on:
Unreal Editor for Fortnite
What Type of Bug are you experiencing?
World Building
Steps to Reproduce
Opened UEFN, clicked on the play session and launched it up only for my map to come up with no grass at all before the update, then after the update a bit of grass appeared on my map and then when I relaunched the play session it ended up disappearing again.
Expected Result
I would like my grass back fully please.
Observed Result
I reinstalled UEFN, reinstalled and updated my driver’s, set my settings all to Epic and still nothing.
I have basically the same issue. I like need my grass to show up in-game and simply work properly. It’s the most significant and noticible visual part of my terrain design. The landscape without the grass and 3D rocks feels emptier and lifeless.
I can’t even publish my game in this state, it’s just terrible, the terrain looks like unfinished mess. Even the terrain HLOD generation is broken. Now it’s simply the worst time trying to make Openworlds.
I’ve restarted my game a few times and it seems like the grass will show up after some time, but I found a few chunks that will simply not render grass even after multiple restarts. The bugged chunks are always the same (Like on the same places).
On my map the bugged chunks are especially around the map and every chunk that is bugged is either touching water or has a sand layer.
Appreciate the team for putting in the work to find out what’s going on here. I feel like the foliage overall is what makes up 80% of the aesthetic of an open-world map, so getting the issue fixed in the end is what will truly be a win for all of us, and especially for the one’s that make open world map’s and are in need of getting the whole thing resolved in best efforts so thanks ahead!
One of our devs did a deep dive, and here’s what he found: here’s what’s happening :
The areas where grass is missing are all located near Fortnite “buildings”, and those in-game automatically spawn a “grass exclusion box” to remove landscape grass wherever they overlap with the landscape.
Once in-game, you end up with those large landscape grass exclusion areas that make it look like grass is partly updated, but it’s actually the expected behavior. The workarounds are :
If possible, rotate/scale the object such that its axis-aligned (blue) bounding box more closely matches the object.
Use basic static meshes rather than FN “buildings”, since static meshes don’t come with that grass exclusion box behavior. If the user authors his own meshes (rather than reusing the buildings we provide), that might be an option, but it also means grass will not be excluded at all within those meshes anymore.
Manually spawn grass instances in the areas where it’s missing (e.g., using the Foliage mode). These are unaffected by the landscape grass exclusion boxes, so this allows the user to compensate.
The dev will follow up with another team to see if anything can be done to expose the bounds visualization, but you will see the bug reporter respond that this is working as intended.
Me again! There will be an update coming in 40.40.
From the dev who worked on this:
I’ve submitted a change in 40.40 that allows to visualize the actor bounds in the shipping editor, so that this type of grass exclusion volume issue can be investigated a bit more easily in UEFN.
