Need some advice on a portfolio piece

JWDD

I'm creating a small scene consisting of standing stones with a central carved rock piece. The ground around this piece is dirt with grassy mounds surrounding each stone. I'm at the point where I'm considering how to add the grass but it's something I haven't done before in UE4.

I already have a modelled out chunk of terrain with mounds and paths in zbrush, but looking at the grass tool it can only be used with landscape actors, would this mean I would be unable to use the default grass with an imported mesh?

The other option is to create some grass in Maya/photoshop and just hand place it on the terrain.

Can any experienced people here give their opinion on the best process?

Obscura

This isn't true. You should be able to paint foliage on static meshes as well.

JWDD

Oh nice, thank you. Do you need to do anything to the mesh before you can paint on it?

Obscura

I was thinking maybe you don't have collision on the mesh and thats why you cannot paint on it. If its a piece of landscape that is nicely lowpoly, you can just turn on per poly collision. Thats what you would probably do with it anyways. 

JWDD

Ah ok, I'll sort that out and see if it works.

Obscura

You should be even able to paint foliage ontop of another foliage. So I can't see a reason for why it wouldn't work. Unless you don't have collision on them or something like that.

JWDD

Just been testing with my ground mesh and it works, thanks.

Obscura

You should change the thread title to "how to paint foliage on static meshes" or something like that.