shader complexity and foliage paint tool

why is the shader complexity that extreme if i use the foliage paint…?
the tree on the left is painted and the five on the right are hand cloned…
those are the same trees…

is there some setting im missing…?

is noone seeing that… what could cause this issue…?
every foliage i paint is getting white in the debug mode…

This could be extra shader complexity from enabling the dithered LOD transitions. But it kind of looks like its rendering the shader complexity using translucent overdraw without using the mask. If so its probably just a bug. You can also enable to dithered LOD transitions in the material settings and see how much that changes things. Maybe that will cause the same bug to occur on the regular mesh.

could that be the “issue” here…?
https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/294925/foliage-loddraw-calls-problem-foliage-system-doesn.html