Here is the deal, I know a lot, but know even less.
This post is just me talking out loud, dealing with some frustration, and I don’t expect answer from you, unless they are readily apparent from my description. What I really need to find is a tutorial on Procedural Landscapes where Foliage assets are attached to specific layers, but I have yet to locate one.
Because I purchased the MAWI Broadleaf Tree Forest Biome, it’s a procedural landscape with foliage assets assigned to landscape layers. Actually I got it on a promotion for free, and I’m still trying to figure out if they will talk to me or not as their official policy is we only talk to you if you paid $ for our asset pack. It’s impressive, but I’m seeing some holes in what was provided online as a tutorial, using a similar but different product, their Conifer forest.
https://www.mawiunited.com/docs/doc_mawi_product_ue_online.html
The associated tutorial was created using UE4. I am using UE5.1. Also I see that it was made using a Conifer forest, so not all of the file names match up. I’ve been able to work through that.
The tutorial example also uses World Creator and imports a bunch of .PNG files, including a heightmap.png into the Landscape Layers. As I don’t have World Creator, I used my own height map, but I noticed that for the Landscape layers, they also imported pngs files like stone.png, and somehow attached them to associated landscape layers.
In the tutorial using UE4, there are spaces under each landscape layer where a file can be attached. In the UE5 Interface, I don’t see a space under each landscape layer as shown in the tutorial, where you could import/attach a .png file. For example stone.png, dirt.png. Not sure what those are. They sound layer related as there are layers labeled stone and dirt.
I have no idea what these .png files are and those files are not found in the package. I might guess they are equivalent of pre-made Layer Info files? In the conversion to UEv5, I have no idea if this is a step that is already covered.
In the tutorial, when the height map was imported in, it was scaled to 1.0 for one of the settings and it made the grid large. I tried to scale my heightmap in the same manner and it got all screwed up so I reverted back to the original scalling.
In the tutorial after finishing importing the heigh map, there is a nice development with different texture variations appearing in the landscape where different textures show.
When i applied this material to my landscape, all I saw was leaves (one of the layers), no auto variation in textures, although I could still go in and paint different textures in different areas. I’m thinkiing I’m missing something here.
There is a Remove Foliage Tool- It does not work on the PFS items, I’ll assume it is intended for the layers, but not for the instanced items place by the Procedual Foliage Spawners? Not sure.
If that is the case, is there an easy way to go in and prune trees placed by a PFS that spawn in bad location, other than tring to use a blocking volume?
BTW, the MAWI replacement BaseEngine.ini causes UEv5.1 to crash. Could you update that or have a work around for that?
Regarding the DefaultEngine Ini, the author suggests using their version of the DefaultEngine.ini, but when I went looking for this file, I found 20 of them located in the different template folders.
Is the idea, that all of these DefaultEngine.inis are supposed to be replaced with your version, or is that a single master DefaultEngin.ini, that I should replace just once?