help needed to grow plants

Development Character & Animation
1

my idea is a survival game where you need to chop down trees and harvest other resource plants and other berries i know this is not new and i can do this already

What i am having a problem with and cant find any info how to after chopping down a lot of trees i would be left with bare ground so what want ti do is plant saplings and after a while they grow to full trees ready for harvesting again
i would like the tree to grow in stages

thanks in advance for and help

2

What you are wanting is something that the world building program Vue does. They have coded algorithms to animate the propagation of plants which you can have a look at on their website. Trouble is it is for image rendering (films and TV).
Doing it in UE4 is another matter. I’m an artist and can tell you that it would be difficult. I could see morphing and scaling branches but the real problem is leaves… There are alot of them! Speed Tree is your first go to for help and it’s only $20 .
Please write Vue and Speed Tree with your request.

3

There are a couple of new animation features in 4.13 that makes this possible.

and

The hard part would be to author the tree growth in a 3d app like 3ds Max or Maya, export to point cache data, and then control the growth using pose animation.

4

Thanks for your reply’s
I is obviously more advanced than i am so…

how would you get trees to grow as they do in ARK where you start with seedling then young plant then after a time a full grown plant which it is ready for harvesting

thanks in advance

5

I never saw a tree growing in realtime. I mean I planted one myself and I saw it …but it took 15 years and it’s still not that huge. If you would do what usually takes many years in a few seconds to give some survivor the chance to fill up it’s inventory again then it is faked anyway. So feel free to be creative. I think I would do some if nobody is looking at my seed then spawn a tiny plant or switch with a bigger version. If I really would do it in realtime for those annoying hard-camping-that-seed survivors I guess I still would just do some scale and rotate stuff.

6

could someone please point me in the direction of this?