I know this is old but is this seriously still not a feature? if not, is there a plugin I can get? I don’t mind if paid.
This topic seems just as relevant and important in 2022, as it was in 2015!
Also if someone solved this by now, I’d definitely pay good money for a solution as well.
The big issue I see is that we would need a capability to selectively not render some of the grass planes/polygons, or meshes at all. As in thinning like this: Grass Settings - Documentation - Unigine Developer
All solutions I can think of in Unreal would simply make the mesh invisible / fully transparent… but that wouldn’t help unless it can then (automatically) not be rendered by the engine anymore.
I think a system like that would ironically improve performance more for common open world scenes than the current Nanite implementation. Simply because UE4 has traditionally already been very good at rendering lots of fully opaque static mesh polygons. Whereas performance falls off a cliff, once a lot of grass, or plants have to be rendered.
Of course Nanite has different advantages, such as not having to create LOD meshes, but that’s a different story.