Hi everyone,
I’m having a persistent issue with foliage not showing up in the distance, and I could really use some advice. In the image attached, the landscape is supposed to be covered in foliage, but those in the distance is disappearing.
Issue Details:
When I move the camera far away, the foliage disappears in the viewport.
This issue happens with both painted foliage and PCG-generated foliage.
The distant foliage also doesn’t render when using Movie Render Queue or standard rendering.
What I’ve Tried:
LOD: The foliage meshes only have one LOD, so it’s not related to LOD switching.
Culling: I’ve checked and disabled all possible culling settings for foliage.
View Distance: Set View Distance and Foliage Quality to Epic in Engine Scalability Settings.
Foliage LOD Distance Factor: Increased this in Project Settings.
Movie Render Queue: Tested rendering through Movie Render Queue, but the issue still persists.
PCG Settings: Reviewed PCG graph for any distance culling or density falloff—nothing seems wrong.
Despite trying all of this, the problem remains.
Has anyone run into this issue before or have any suggestions? I’d appreciate any help!
Hello there @LilyZhai! Let’s see what we can do here.
From your description, it sounds like you have already covered most of the possible cultrips. I would like to test one culling fix that may be missing yet, as it did work in a previous thread. The foliage guide from dev community states the following:
Foliage instances are rendered as clusters in a single draw call and each cluster is either rendered or not rendered based on occlusion. Setting a value in the End Cull Distance parameter in the foliage details causes the clusters to be culled beyond that distance. However, this will cause groups of meshes to disappear abruptly as the entire cluster goes out of range.
This can be reduced by adding a Start Cull Distance parameter and then setting up the Material appropriately. In the vertex shader, a per-instance fading factor is calculated, which goes from 1.0 at the start distance to 0.0 at the end distance. This is accessible in the Material using a PerInstanceFadeAmount node. When connecting that to an opacity or masking value, you can use it to fade instances over a distance before they reach the Cull Distance End and are removed from rendering. Lowering the value of the FadeMultiplier parameter will increase the speed of the fade. A value of zero will make your foliage invisible at any distance.
The example Material below multiplies the Material mask by the fading factor to thin out the foliage mesh’s leaves until they completely disappear.
Under 0 I believe it will default to whatever graphics/scalability is set to, try bumping max distance to full or something super high like 20k and see if that helps
