I use procedural foliage in an open world map that consists of 25 world partition sectors. I’ve placed foliage in the world using procedural foliage volumes. The individual foliage types are pretty much optimized (no collision, no raytracing, aggressive cull distances etc.).
The foliage is visually culled at the correct distance. But this appears to be only a visual hiding. It’s not unloaded.
After flying around a bit in the world, I get an error message that says that I’ve hit a hard limit of 16 million instances being loaded at the same time. The warning stays on the screen until I exit the game, even if I move to an area where there’s no foliage visible at all.
The foliage isn’t unloaded, but only visually hidden in the distance. I’ve tried a ton of approaches already, but didn’t find a way to make the foliage remove itself from the game in a far distance.