Tips & Tricks

Layer per intent. Don't paint everything in one mega-stroke. Paint discrete passes - "rocks along the path", "boulders against the cliff," "pebbles in the basin" - as separate strokes so each becomes its own layer. This lets you tune, delete, or merge them later without affecting the rest.

Build coarse to fine. Large boulders first (cluster size 1-3, large radius), then smaller rocks (cluster size 5-10, medium radius), then pebbles (cluster size 15-20, small radius). This produces realistic size sorting because each pass settles into the gaps left by the previous.

Pre-tune in a sandbox level. Before painting on your hero level, make a small test level with the same surface material and physical material setup. Tune brush radius, scale ranges, friction multipliers there. Then bring those settings (manually - settings don't transfer between sessions) to the hero level.

Save before Force Bake All. Force Bake All produces irreversible mid-air piles for any cubes that hadn't settled. Save the level first; if you don't like the result, reload.

Cap simulating actors based on your hardware. 2000 default works on most modern systems. On laptops or older machines, 500-1000 is safer. The cost is paint-time only - once cubes bake, no per-instance cost remains.

Bake aggressively for big scenes. If you're scattering thousands of items, paint a region, click Force Bake All to clear the simulation queue, paint the next region. Avoids accumulating mounting simulation cost across the session.

Don't paint into a level with hidden complex blueprints. If your level is heavy with tickable actors, every physics tick takes longer because the editor's tick infrastructure is shared. The plugin doesn't make this worse than UE itself, but heavy levels make the simulation visibly slower.

Use simple primitive meshes for stress testing. Cube_StaticMesh from Engine content is the gold standard for quickly verifying scatter behavior without confusing variables. Confirm physics is working with a cube before debugging on your art assets.

Wider scale ranges look more natural. Min 0.6 / Max 1.4 reads as "natural rock variety." Min 0.95 / Max 1.05 reads as "uniformly placed copies." Default 0.8/1.2 is a compromise - push it for nature scenes.

Mix high-weight primary with low-weight accents. Three meshes at weights 5, 2, 1 produces a clear primary with sparse accents - the "natural" feel. Three at 1, 1, 1 produces a uniform mix - more pattern-like.

Use per-mesh scale multipliers for dramatic class differences. Boulders at 2.0/3.0, rocks at 0.7/1.3, pebbles at 0.1/0.3 - all in one palette. The brush picks weighted-randomly, but each mesh spawns at its appropriate size. No need to switch palettes mid-paint.

Restitution 0.0 looks more realistic for most natural scatter. Real rocks don't bounce. Default 1.0 (whatever the source asset specifies) often looks gummy.

Random rotation off for upright objects. Trees, signs, lamp posts, tombstones - these have a clear "up." Disable random rotation; the gravity-driven settling will still rotate them naturally as they fall and land.

Rename layers immediately after painting. "Layer 7" tells you nothing in three weeks. "MainPathRocks" is searchable and meaningful.

Merge related layers when you're done iterating. Once you're happy with five hillside rock passes, merge them into "HillsideRocks." Keeps the panel clean.

Don't merge while still iterating. Once merged, the individual stroke history is lost - you can't separately delete one of the five.

FT_Chaos output is just HISMs. Once baked, your scatter is standard HISM components. They participate in:

• World Partition streaming

• LOD systems (set on the source mesh)

• Lighting builds

• Nanite (if the source mesh is Nanite-enabled)

• Niagara collision (you can shoot particles at FT_Chaos rocks like any other static geometry - but only if the source mesh has collision)

The manager actor is permanent. Don't delete FT_Chaos_HISM from your level unless you want to permanently lose all your scatter work for that level. If you do delete it accidentally, layers and HISMs are gone - there's no recovery.

Layers persist with the level save. Save your level after painting. Reopening shows your scatter intact.

Things FT_Chaos does NOT do (yet)

• Brush replay across levels. Settings don't transfer; you re-tune per session.

• Stroke replay. The brush snapshot is recorded but not replayable.

• Reactivate/attract brush. Bringing baked instances back into simulation. Planned for future versions.

• Per-stroke physical material override. Multipliers are global per session.

• Animated paint patterns (lines, splines, curves). Single-click and drag only.