So I was working on a project, its a rather big scene but not crazy big either, and after finishing up my foliage(which is only grass), I saved my project then closed it. Next morning I open the project and all my foliage is gone.
(note: there was an update where I had to restart UE before I decided to open the level/project so i dont know if the update is part of the problem or not)
It looks like my foliage had actually been deleted by unreal engine after opening my project. Because ALL the foliage/grass I was using are set on 0(the count of how many were painted in)…
Please tell me there’s a way to bring back my foliage… 
I’d hate to have to paint the whole thing again. I know I saved the level before closing UE5… So I don’t understand what’s going on. Its honestly really frustrating. I’ve contacted customer support in megascans but they said this was an “unreal engine settings issue” and they’re not specialized in it so only an unreal engine dev can help. so they gave me a link and sent me here.
I’ve done some research and it looks like someone else had the same problem on reddit. someone explained in the comments that it could be that the world partition is not enabled? But its an old post so the person who needed help never replied if that fixed the problem or not. I checked and I don’t have world partition enabled either.
I went ahead and enabled it and converted my level(made a copy of it just in case). Could that be the case? And would that help avoid UE from deleting my grass? I don’t want to waste my time and paint my foliage again if it’s just going to get deleted later along the way. I’ve only been using unreal for a year so I’m still somewhat new to it. so I dont know what is or isnt a permanent fix. I feel like a grandma trying to figure out what those words even mean.
IF enabling world partition is what is going to permanently solve my problem and avoid UE from deleting my foliage again, please let me know. that way I can continue working without stressing if it’ll happen again. (if there’s also a way to recover my deleted foliage too, that would also be great, it would save me a lot of time and tears)
Any help is appreciated, thank you. <3
Extra details:
-
I’m using Unreal engine 5.2.1 for this project.
-
dont know if this is important but here: I had problems earlier with my foliage before all this happened. It would lose its details when you zoomed out as well as lose its shadows so it looked super bright. So I managed to fix it by following these two videos:
(3) Maximizing Foliage Quality in UE5: LOD & Nanite Tips - YouTube
It fixed the problem. I set my LODs to 0 and enabled nanitne for all my grass. but my foliage would still disappear when I zoomed out even if my culling was set to 0. thats when I would follow the second the video by going into Material Property Overrides and setting it to 0.1 I did this for all my grass too.
(3) UE QuickTip | Fix Disappearing Foliage Nanite Models - YouTube
since then I haven’t had any problems since. everything went smoothly for a few days. I’d add my foliage no issues. Whenever I was done for the day and open the level/file the next day my grass would still be there. my foliage never disappeared nor got deleted up until this morning. So I don’t know what happened there…
-
The grass I used were the ones from Quixel Bridge. I used their “Wild Grass”(just a few) and a few of Kikuyu Grass. Making a total of 7 individual grass types used from those two to paint my foliage. I havent used any other type of foliage. Just the grass. Plan was to focus on adding the grass foliage first then add details like flowers later.
-
I have a powerful pc made for someone who works on 3D and CGI, so I know my computer isn’t the problem and its still fairly new. I have the Nvidia Geforce 3090 Ti, over 64GB of RAM, 2TB of memory, with the 12th Gen i9, etc etc. like over the top stuff. I mainly use Zbrush or Maya among other 3D softwares. I’m still new-ish to unreal engine but I really like it.
Any help is greatly appreciated.