Scattering Procedural Foliage on Specific Meshes Only

Development World Creation
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In Unreal Engine 5.5, when using Procedural Foliage to scatter grass on meshes, how can I scatter it only on specific meshes?
Currently, it scatters on all meshes within the volume.
In the Procedural Foliage Spawner, there’s an option to input Component Tags, and I’ve added tags there and to the desired meshes, but it’s not working.

How can I exclude specific meshes or include only specific meshes?

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Hey! @gallerykim I’m not an expert on this topic, but I did some research and found information that might help you solve your problem.

Regarding the issue you’re facing: in Unreal Engine 5.5, the Procedural Foliage Volume (PFV) system doesn’t natively support filtering meshes based on Component Tags.
PFV simply checks for collision surfaces (World Static) inside the volume it doesn’t use tags or mesh attributes for scattering decisions.
This is because PFV was originally designed to scatter foliage mainly over landscapes, and its logic relies on collision detection, not metadata or tags.

Solutions you could try:

Adjust Collision Settings

  • Only enable collision on the meshes you want foliage to spawn on.
  • Set unwanted meshes to NoCollision or use a different collision type.

Use PCG (Procedural Content Generation):

  • PCG gives you much more control.
  • You can filter where to scatter based on tags, surface materials, normals, slope, and more.

I found a very good tutorial that explains how to set up PCG to scatter foliage specifically on meshes:

If you’re still facing challenges or have new questions, feel free to share.

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PCG is a powerful and impressive tool but in many cases it’s simply too much. Often people just want to scatter some simple foliage (grass, shrubs etc.) and call it a day. The PFVs are a great way to get that done, but I have a feeling that this system gets more and more muted and forgotten.

It would’ve been very easy to just add a few little features (like excluding certain SMs etc.) and it would be good for 90% of most common use cases. Or maybe just allow users to “lock” actors in the outliner to exclude them from whatever processes like PFV (something that’s badly missing anyway).

I just run into another limitation, where PF doesn’t seem to properly unload in world partition maps. It’s just frustrating to be pushed into PCG, especially if PF gets the job done just fine in most cases. KISS! PCG is overkill IMO. But it’s typical Epic to aim for the stars instead of consolidating already existing tools and systems.