In this lesson, you will learn how to optimize your environment’s ground cover by configuring Landscape Grass Types to dynamically spawn and cull vegetation based on camera proximity.
While Procedural Foliage Volumes are excellent for individual actor placement, Landscape Grass Types are designed for high-density, performant ground cover that ties directly into your Landscape Material. By leveraging these assets, you avoid the heavy overhead of individual Actors, instead treating grass meshes as transient, GPU-instanced geometry.
Configuring the Landscape Grass Type
Create a new Landscape Grass Type asset in your Content Browser. Within this asset, you define the meshes you want to spawn—such as various grass blades, flowers, or small rocks. For each entry, you must set the Start Cull Distance and End Cull Distance. These settings are critical; they define the range at which your vegetation gracefully fades in and out. Because this system is tightly integrated with the engine’s rendering pipeline, these meshes will cull automatically as the camera moves away, drastically reducing the draw call count in vast landscapes.
Integrating with the Landscape Material
To make these assets spawn, you must link them to your Landscape Material using the LandscapeGrassOutput node. Inside your material graph, you define the "Grass Map" by plugging your layer weights into the output:
// Within the Landscape Material Graph
// Assign the 'Landscape Grass Type' asset to the corresponding layer
// Layer Name: "Grass" -> Landscape Grass Type: "LGT_Meadow"
Once assigned, the engine reads the layer weight data from your terrain. Where your layer intensity is high (painted on the landscape), the Landscape Grass Type will procedurally populate the terrain with instances. Because the system is density-driven, it automatically adapts to the terrain's topography, ensuring that your vegetation density remains consistent even as you sculpt or modify the landscape.
By balancing the Density parameter against your End Cull Distance, you can maintain high visual fidelity in the immediate foreground while keeping the performance cost flat across the horizon.
Key Takeaway: Landscape Grass Types provide a high-performance, instance-based solution for dense vegetation that culls automatically based on camera distance, effectively decoupling visual complexity from actor-based CPU overhead.