Yes. Instances are powerful. I’m using them in GOLEM ECS. UE4 4.7 has significantly improved Foliage rendering performance with Hundreds of thousands of foliage instances that can be efficiently rendered and edited, with per-instance LOD support and per-pixel dithered LOD transitions. I hope this performance boost applies to instanced static meshes as well so I create some really nifty GOLEM Monsters.
