Saving project with a lot of foliage takes ages to complete. The example in the picture contains over 2.5 mil. foliage objects. Performance is fine, but even if I don’t change anything on the foliage it makes saving the project painfully slow.
I tried to make the terrain object (static mesh) an instanced packed level hoping it won’t force resaving the foliage, but that didn’t help. Is there a workaround or another way of populating scene with a ton of objects?(one that won’t make unreal halt for full 2 min. whilst saving)
See a sub level as a layer. Check the unreal documentation for details. Once you added a sub level you can set the streaming method in the level browser to always loaded. Or you need a blueprint to load it at runtime.
With foliage you would need to have the base mesh and the foliage in the same level. Otherwise you may lose all your foliage. So before you do anything make a back up copy.
Alright so I learned that instanced level works for this, but I had to turn the base mesh into instanced level first and then go into edit mode and do the foliage.
Foliage will not go into the instanced level via conversion. Has to be done afterwards.
I hope 5.1 will improve large amounts of foliage anyways, cause the performance drop and memory consumption after few hundred thousand objects is pretty drastic.
What I usually do is leave the foliage in the original level and then copy everything else into a new level. You can use ctrl+c/v or use ‘move select actor to this level’ in the level browser.
I have only the player start in the persistent level and put everything else into sub levels (eg. building, furniture, decoration, exterior)
If you want to render a movie you would need a separate persistent level that auto-starts the movie. So it’s good to not have much in the persistent levels. At least that’s how it was in previous unreal engine versions.
It’s also good if more than one person work on a project.
