Open World - 18 Grass Type Limit Reached on Landscape Material

Hello!

I have asked this question on a couple of different forums and either I get no response or the person answering my question does not fully understand my question. So I apologize in advance if my knowledge is lacking to describe my current problem. I will try my best!

I have made a 40km x 40km landscape for an open world project I am working on. I am using world partition and it is all one single landscape that I put together in Houdini. I have about ~12 different biomes currently on the map. Each have multiple layers (base, sediment, rock, etc) that I have created with masks in Houdini. These different layers have been put into an auto-material I created. The layers are working great! The map looks great!

Now to the issue I found. I love the grass type feature where you can procedurally generate foliage onto these layers. Initially, I had at least 1 grass type for each layer. I also added some extra grass types to a layer using some randomized noise which really made the landscapes look great! Once I hit over 18 grass types I realized that my grasses were no longer showing up. Looking into this, a landscape material is hard-coded to only allow 18 grass types. I could go into a shader file and change it, but that defeats the purpose of an auto-material in my opinion.

I cannot find another solution on the internet or tutorials. I did read a suggestion of stitching each biome together in UE, each having its own landscape material. From what I can tell, stitching pieces are in block and my biomes would not line up. Any creative or obvious solutions to this problem? I am enjoying trying to make my world look beautiful, realistic, and optimized and this hard limit is ruining my ability to add dynamic, procedural ground foliage.

Thank you!

Use the procedural foliage tools instead.

Hello MostHost_LA,

I appreciate the reply. I have had issues using Procedural Foliage Spawners. For example, after reading your post, I deleted the grass types and tried todo it in the spawners. For some reason, one mesh which worked fine with the grass types completely lagged the whole map. It was a coconut mesh and I only had ~40 dispersed through my whole tropical biome. I removed it from the spawner and resimulated. Fixed the FPS issues, however, the coconut meshes are still in my level and I cannot find a way to delete them/click on them. I have had some other issues with them too where it crashed UE when I hit the resimulate button.

Thanks again for the support!

When it gets stuck on silly delete the spawners and it should remove all the instances.

If not, try and isolate in the level bleprint the actor in charge of them, and deleting it.

Regarding the low fps, I think maybe the system spawned multiple copies on top of one another from the way you are describing it. And/or you may have had a collision issue of some sort.