I was playing with Procedural Foliage Spawners and decided to delete a coconut foliage actor that was still attached to a foliage spawner. I performed a force delete, realized the coconuts where still there after I resimulated the spawner. I ended up deleting the whole foliage spawner, but the coconuts are still there. I am using world partition and I do not have any unloaded assets in my world. I cannot find these coconut meshes anywhere! I cannot even click on them.
Anyone else have this problem or have a solution? I plan on using a ton of foliage spawners for my different biomes. If they are buggy, maybe I need to look into other options.
Hey there @RoflRAWR! Alright so first things first I’m going to ask you to backup your project right now. The fact that this broken reference didn’t crash you is nothing short of a miracle. I even crashed my own client 4 times while trying to recreate this so I could see if I could still clear the references, so I apologize that I don’t have picture reference right now haha.
If at all possible avoid using Force Delete with instance foliage meshes in the future without gutting it’s reference from everything in scenes. Everything is fine usually, but when things go sideways they go really sideways.
Do they still have an entry under the instanced foliage mesh actor components in scene? It won’t be visible in the outliner but you can select any instanced foliage and look into the other components and see if it lets you select the references in scene.
Also 10/10 on the comment about the rogue coconuts.
I was a little embarrassed to show my now naked coconuts (I deleted all of the other foliage on my map), but since you have put this much work into helping me. Here you go:
It is still early into my project. So If I need to start it over, it would not be too bad. I do plan on using a ton of foliage spawners as the grass types inside of my auto material max out at 18.
This is a humbling experience in best practices and learning how to fix this in the future if it happens again will be great.
I am not sure that I have any more instanced actors other then the tree meshes you can see on the screen. I tried to include as much information as I could in the screen capture. Let me know if there is anything else I can do. Thank you again for the support! I am having a blast learning UE!
You probably need to go in programmatically too…
See the comments at the end of this. It’s for a foliage type, but it would work very similar with the procedural stuff.
Generally speaking * ALL * instanced things have a “registry” so to speak that references all the meshes being used.
How that mesh is still visible after being force deleted from the project. Well, that’s a mistery aint it?
Usually. Close the project. Delete /saved (check exactly what folders) and cause a recompile of all materials / geometry etc.
And if the mesh does not exist and is trying to be used, youll get errors in the output log.
I understand! I agree with MH, if you can’t get a reference in outliner and they aren’t selectable, close the editor and check to see if there are any files left over. If there aren’t, you may want to duplicate the level and see if they remain in the duplicate.
The procedural foliage system is still under experimentation currently so it’s got some kinks to work out. One of them is that they aren’t normally assigned a mesh in the normal way objects are, so when you start breaking references things get less than preferable.
Were these added with the procedural volumes and does resimulating them crash you?
@SupportiveEntity I used a procedural foliage spawner. Resimulating did not crash my project.
@MostHost_LA I deleted the /saved folder. Coconuts still rogue and I still cannot click on them. There were quite a few errors in the output log when loading the map, none of which seemed to talk about the asset though.
I think what I am going todo is create a new level and rebuild what I have done. I will make sure that I do not force delete anything from this point on.
Hrm, something must have happened to detach the procedural foliage spawner from the instanced mesh reference. As in my tests I can reliably crash my editor for looking for resources that don’t exist anymore. Also as MH said force delete isn’t bad in all cases, but when working with instanced meshes you always should clear their references out of levels first as sometimes weird things can occur. This is likely caused by how the procedural foliage spawner handles it’s references. If it’s not too much hassle, could you send in a bug report for it? Since this tool is still experimental this is pretty good info for the team handling it!
If I could replicate your issue explicitly I would just submit it for you, but my crash is somewhat expected as to where the coconuts remain is… not.
