We are now going to look at how to add foliage: Trees, Plants and even Rocks to our environment whereby these static meshes will follow the contours of our landscape.

We first need to change to Foliage Mode, Shift + 3

You may notice there is an Add Foliage area under the Foliage panel, to add static meshes to the foliage brushes simply select the meshes you wish to be added to the Foliage Type area by dragging them from Content Browser to the Drop Foliage Here area until it goes yellow then release the Left Mouse Button.

If we were to click on our landscape it would ‘paint’ / add these static meshes to our landscape in a clump i.e. all Static meshes would be added on top of each other.

To fix this change Single Instance Mode to Cycle through Selected.

We can Shift click to select static meshes and clicking on the Tick in top corner next to each static mesh will toggle between it being active or not active in brush selection.

Static meshes that are enabled are not greyed out indicated by no tick symbol next to mesh.

By default these static Meshes will have NoCollosion we can change this by selecting each static mesh within the foliage panel and scrolling down to where it says Collision Presets and changing this to BlockAll.

Bear in mind the player will not be able to pass through these object if this is enabled you can also adjust scale ratios and rotational values per foliage mesh this way. This will act retroactively to any assets you have already placed on landscape.

The Foliage tool can also be used for None Foliage related assets.

To Erase these painted on static meshes you can toggle which elements will be affected via enabling or disabling the meshes from the foliage type panel.