I’m playing with the cascade values now, though it doesn’t seem affect anything in this scene, but I doubt it’s the directional light’s fault since the same happens in my main scene with only an hdri dome + skylight.
I’m not sure what exactly is going on with the LODs since they are easily apparent in unlit/lit mode but aren’t in path tracing. I’m guessing path trace mode auto disables LODs or something because I can’t tell anything apart. Performance is actually quite good in path tracing, the grass hurts performance a bit but not anything crazy (it’s actually better than some other DCCs I’ve tried with similar scenes).
(Path traced - no visible LODs)
(Lit - obvious LODs)
I wouldn’t think it’s the model LODs causing the circle since I’ve also tried forcing them to LOD0 via console command, but maybe this is something Path Tracing overrides? I might try manually deleting every LOD except 0 on each grass mesh, but I have serious doubts that LODs are the problem given that I can’t see lower LODs anyway. Plus, intuitively, light should react to the WPO of every LOD the same, regardless. But I won’t rule it out yet since it seems like I’ve tried everything else.
I totally would go manual painting route but it seems like it takes up a lot more memory to do so given just how many instances there are. From what I understand, because you can manually manipulate each instance, it’s storing position, scale rotation values for each instance which consumes more memory than landscape grass (I don’t remember where I read this so my reasoning might be wrong). I’ve been running into a bunch of walls with landscape grass and would be happy to switch to something else, but nothing I’ve tried performs as well. I might try in the future to test painted foliage just to see if the circle disappears but it wouldn’t be a viable solution for me since I do remember it being a huge performance hit.
Do you have any idea how I could contact a mod? 5 minutes of Google searching yields no good results.