Landscape Grass Takes Forever To Show Up

As the title says, it takes up 20 seconds for the landscape grass to appear, depending on what tile the landscape starts generated from. My landscape isn’t that gigantic, 1x1 km in size, but this issue still persists in both PIE and stand alone builds.

Anyone got any ideas?

Hi,

I was having the same problem.

Two things seemed to help, firstly doubling my ram from 8 to 16gb and secondly adjusting the grass meshes to have more quads so the instance count was lower per kilometer of terrain.

You can also lower the number of instances per kilometer within the landscape grass type, this helped massively but taking it too low made the grass appear in “clumps” which I guess can be made to look natural but didn’t look right in my game.

After the tweaks landscape appears within 2 seconds and appears quicker in a standalone build.

I am using 4.8.2.

Let me know if this helps!

I’ll try the quad method but my density is a meager ~200 as is, I doubt that’s the issue. I’m already sporting 16gb of RAM.

Adding quads does appear to improve it somewhat, but even with the smaller quads, a density of 250 should be laughable. I can’t make the mesh cover a too big of an area because it gets screwed up on smaller platforms and sharp angles.

Bump, still can’t find a solution for this.

Well, if anyone is having this issue, I’ve done some research, although didn’t produce a solution.

Changing the grass mesh and using a lower density didn’t do anything. This is definitely some sort of engine bug because while not playing inside the editor the grass loads just fine. I could literally be at the start point with the camera, with the grass all there, and when I hit play, the grass would clear and very slowly load back in.

I might be wrong but I think this started with 4.9.

I’m having the same issue in 4.21.

We are also experiencing this issue. If there is a lot of people having this issue. Reference this forum as well, there has to be a solution or something that we are doing wrong.

Hi @Jessy5765 - i’m coming back now to the project that uses this, and I’ve managed to put in a workaround. If you use the “Grass” node in your landscape material node to place grass, rather than manual placement with the foliage tool, then the grass will appear near instantly every time.

Whatever the issue is, it only happens with manually placed foliage that is placed with the foliage tool (tested on latest 4.23.0) and is a direct function of the amount of foliage in the area - basically meaning that if I just place a small copse of 30 trees they’ll appear almost instantly, same time as the grass, whereas if I try to add an entire forest of trees, the same problem will persist.

I did log a request many years ago on answerhub, but Epic couldn’t reproduce. Looking at it and thinking logically, it is probably because the kite demo they tested under used the grass node to place the grass? (this is just a guess, i have to actually take a look and see!) so they wouldn’t see a problem.

In the long run though, using the Grass node is far superior as nobody has time to be manually splatting foliage all over their world with a painting tool.

Hope this helps someone!

im getting this bug with grass node on 5.5 :sob:
in my case, changing density makes no difference and the only way to make it appear faster is to lower grass varieties count