Falling leaves fx

Development Programming & Scripting AI
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1

What I’m doing

So I’m working on a low poly styled world and have trees now.

Problem

The actual problem is, that I want to create an effect which let’s leaves fall down from trees.
The leaves are polygons of 3 vertices. (Vertex painted)

What I did

I tried to make an empty actor with a script attached which creates leave objects over and over again. Except of the blueprint stuff not working, when I apply gravity, the leaf doesn’t fall down but instead it moves in x/y direction without reason. (Gravity was something like 0.1)

Problems with the script

I created a point inside of the world which was the start position for the leaves.
Then I connected the “on start” node with the “spawn actor” node, so my
trees are being generated when the game starts of course.

So I have a few question now.

  1. How can I tell the node which object I want to spawn?
  2. I created the script for an empty object. Is that good, or should I create the script for the tree?
  3. Why is the gravity behaviour strange? Is there some kind of “wind/weather” in every scene?
  4. Any idea/s how to make falling leaves?

I’m new to ue4 so sorry if that question is unnecessary.
Well a C++ solution would be okay too, because I can programm in.
I just avoid using C++ because I’m not used to the ue4 classes and
I am playing around with the engine for now. So blueprint is
easy to understand I guess.

Thanks~

2

I think you would need to post a video of your problem. Why not use particles? Find a sparks particle in one of the free projects, change the image to leaves, tweak the settings.

3

Not really an answer but [FREE] Foliage Starter Kit - World Creation - Epic Developer Community Forums is a free foliage starter kit that has falling leaves particle in it.

4

For this kind of effect it is more recommended to use a particle effect instead of an blueprint actor. The continous creation of single leaf objects is not very efficient.

Particle effects are created especially for this type of effect. I suggest to check this page to learn more about them: Creating Visual Effects in Niagara for Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.2 Documentation

With a particle system you can easily handle multiple leaves and control more precise their behavior.