UE5 static mesh foliage not appearing at a distance

Variant

I'm using a procedural foliage spawner in UE5 to spawn the "Toad rush" and "Rabbit rush" foliages from megascans but they seem to not appear at some distance as you can see here

Apparently the foliage is there as they appear when the camera gets close to it but not when it's far. I've checked distance culling and it's set to zero, there are no LOD issues either since I've turned off auto LOD. The other foliage types such as the cactus and the smaller grass which are also from megascans render fine. What could be the issue?

Edit: Another thing I just noticed is that the foliage only disappears when the camera looks directly at it i.e the center of the camera is focused at the foliage area but when it's looking away it renders fine on the sides.

poopipe

put a basic material on it and see what happens - that'll tell you whether the weird ass megascans material is breaking it or not

Variant

I tried using a different material but the problem persists. It has actually gotten worse now and all of the grass instanced foliage disappears entirely when the camera focuses directly at it but comes back when it looks a bit away

Maybe the size of it has made it worse but I don't understand why it should be a problem? Since it's specifically those grass foliages and not the cactus foliages of the same type and materials from megascans.

Alex_J

Just guessing here but in the Foliage mode panel check the Cull Distance Max setting. Also check the LOD settings in the static mesh asset.

Play with those values and see if it makes any difference.

Thought process is that distance culling is based on either distance from camera or size on the screen - sometimes because of camera's FOV you can kind of see the sphere that this creates. You can also scale the instances like 2x just to make it easier to see and evaluate.

also it sounds like you verified material is not the problem, but ensure that you set the default material to all the LODs in the static mesh details panel, not just lod0. You'd especially want to ensure that you are evaluating the last LOD (normally that would have the billboard material).