Various Issues with Open World Creation

Development World Creation
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Here’s some issues I’ve run into making open worlds. If anyone knows of any workarounds/fixes, let me know. I’ve tried pretty much everything and looked everywhere. Thanks!

  • Instanced foliage doesn’t impact navmesh. Even if you tell it to with the Custom Navigable Geometry setting. I’ve seen other people asking about this for UE5 and it just seems broken. This means using something like a procedural foliage spawner (or manual) for trees/rocks is not possible.
  • Instanced foliage doesn’t seem to respect World Partition. As far as I can tell it just uses its own culling settings and doesn’t unload and transition to HLOD. It seems like it’s generating the HLODs (it takes a while and the bake says it works) but it never actually unloads and transitions to it. Similar to the previous item, this makes it not viable to use instanced foliage for larger items, only something like grass.
  • Houdini imports are incredibly slow. In comparison to spawning thousands and thousands of assets with a procedural foliage spawner, importing a point cloud to place assets using Houdini is orders of magnitude slower. Specifically instead of maybe like a minute or two, it can take hours or even days. It’s also never clear if it’s actually working or just froze on the large scale tests (1kmx1km and up)
  • If you save an HDA with lots of embedded components, it just crashes. Once those imports do complete, you can’t save that. The only workaround is to bake out all the components into the level and THEN save.
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Do they have collision setup correctly? I can confirm that my trees are altering the navmesh

Isn’t this a desired behaviour? You usually don’t want trees in the distance to disappear when you are far from them, in my opinion the culling distance is prefereable for foliage compared to world partition, but maybe there’s a way to make it work with it

I’ve never used Houdini so I can’t tell you anything about the last two paragraphs

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Yeah the collision is setup just fine. I even setup an Editor Utility Widget that converts it to static meshes and that makes navmesh just fine. All the foliage options about navmesh make no difference. In case it matters, since it’s more complicated stuff, it’s not just box collision, but convex hulls.

And yes, I want them to respect world partition and go into HLOD. It’s not just for trees, but rocks and other larger pieces and I want them to unload like normal to transition to LOD. It has all the options to theoretically do this, it just doesn’t do it.

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Also related to that Editor Utility Widget, the only way to get rid of foliage is with the foliage tools. If you use an EUW and do it, it comes back after you restart the editor. There appears to be no way to force that to delete and actually save.