So here’s my situation, I have a landscape material built out with custom foliage, and foliage spawners. everything works and looks great for my current stage in my development process.
However after trying to simulate foliage for my map. (it is composed of 16 tiles.) it takes forever! now im not expecting things to take 30 seconds at my scale but it will really slow down my teams dev cycle for world design if we cant get foliage to resimulate in a reasonable amount of time. Anywhere I should look to start optimizing my foliage spawner? does disabling lightmap UVs at each LOD help? ive read something to the effect that Lightmaps can mess with dynamic lighting and slow things down while spawning. If anyone has any tips or advice it would be so much appreciated. If i need to clarify anything please let me know.
Just an addition for my current work around seems to be using a primitive foliage spawner that just spawns cubes on the forested materials. once were done painting we will add foliage, however It also can take some time for the entire map to produce simple cubes.
Same issue here… It looks like it’s just an unoptimized tool (it’s in beta for a long time). You can see CPU usage is very low when calculating, it looks very single threaded.
Disabling lightmaps shouldn’t make any difference. The bottleneck has nothing to do with the mesh itself, but with the algorithms calculating their position based on the procedural rules you created.
One way of improving speed is to reduce the amount of foliage components (less stuff interacting with each other). I’ve created two or three copies of the same spawner volume for different “types” of assets that I don’t care too much if they overlap. Like one for debris and rocks, another for small plants and other for tall plants. But even then I’m waiting for like 1 to 2 hours to spawn foliage on large landscapes.