A way to place foliage not affecting the landscape?

Development World Creation
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1

I’m creating a new level for a multiplayer FPS game. The process consists in using already existing landscape levels provided by the game developer, which means I can’t modify the landscape but I can place any assets on this new level.

Here’s the problem: I want to add random foliage to create a more natural world instead of using their plain landscape (there’s nothing, just the terrain), but:

  1. I can’t modify the landscape level otherwise the game will ignore these changes and use the original landscape.
  2. Placing that kind of random foliage one by one (manually) would take years to finish.
  3. Painting foliage or using the Procedural Foliage Spawner, both methods modify the original landscape. I don’t know if there is any way to make these methods not change the original landscape.

So I would like to know if there is any alternative method to add foliage without changing the original landscape level, as if I were manually placing asset by asset.

2

You can write your own procedural tool. It’s not that hard. Collision box, line trace downwards to landscape, random positions in the box.

You can use HISM, so it’s efficient.

I don’t know how well versed in blueprint you are?

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3

Unfortunately I’m not good at these things… I’m just the guy that create nice map layouts/ideas, only that.
I’m actually looking for something ready made, preferably something that is already part of the EU, not something that would need to be built from scratch. I also thought that there might be some trick to prevent painting foliage or the Procedural Foliage Spawner from altering the landscape :confused:

4

Might take a look at the simple scatter plugin. Author has a thread here you could ask if it suits your needs, but to the best of my knowledge it sounds like just the thing you need.

Gives simple artist friendly procedural gen, but doesn’t require landscape (it works on static mesh just the same). As the procedural foliage is not linked to the landscape layers, I think it would be safe for what you’ve described.

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5

It really depends what your requirements are. If you just want to place a variety of trees and rocks etc ( a list of meshes, scale, random rotation ), it’s like 20 nodes. ( I can put the code here ).

But if you want some plants only growing near other plants etc and lifetimes and seasons, get a tool :slight_smile:

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