How to interact with foliage?

Development Programming & Scripting
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I want to be able to interact with certain types of foliage.

For example if I have a strawberry bush I would like to be able to press E and pick up strawberries.

I know how to do this with blueprints, just make a blueprint full of strawberry trees and make it so that when you press E a montage plays and a buch of strawberry items appear in your inventory. Just as you would do with any other interactable item.

But, if I want to use the foliage painting tools, how can I do it? I know I can place static meshes with that, but not create logic for them? Is there a better way?

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Interacting with foliage that has been painted using the Foliage tool in Unreal Engine can be a bit more involved than with individual Blueprint actors, because foliage instances don’t carry the same kind of logic as a regular actor. However, there are ways to achieve what you want:

  1. **Foliage Instance as a Reference:**The typical approach involves using the painted foliage instance as a reference point. When the player tries to interact (e.g., presses “E”), you’ll check for nearby foliage instances of the type you’re interested in, and perform the desired action.
  2. Step-by-Step Approach:
  • Foliage Setup:
    • Create a Static Mesh for the strawberry bush.
    • In the Foliage tool, add the strawberry bush Static Mesh so you can paint it in the world.
  • Player Interaction:
    • When the player presses “E”, perform a sphere check or raycast in front of the player to determine what they’re looking at or what’s nearby.
    • If the hit result is a foliage instance, check if it’s of the type “strawberry bush” (You can use the instance’s Static Mesh to verify this).
    • If it’s the correct type, play the montage and add strawberries to the inventory. You can also consider removing or altering the foliage instance to represent that it has been picked.
  • Foliage Instance Modification:
    • If you want to modify the foliage (e.g., make the bush appear picked), you can either:
      1. Replace the instance with another mesh (e.g., a picked version of the bush).
      2. Remove the instance altogether to show it’s been picked.
  1. **Blueprint Communication:**The Foliage tool in Unreal doesn’t inherently support logic like Blueprints do. However, by using Blueprint interfaces or custom events, you can establish communication between your character/player controller and the foliage instances.This way, you can abstract most of the logic into your character or controller, and only reference the foliage tool for the location and type of the foliage instance.
  2. **Performance Consideration:**Remember that one of the reasons the Foliage tool doesn’t embed logic in each instance is for performance. Foliage is optimized for rendering large numbers of static instances. If you’re planning to have many interactable instances, be mindful of performance and test frequently to ensure there’s no significant drop in frame rate.
  3. **Using Third-Party Tools/Plugins:**There are plugins and tools available that expand the functionality of the Foliage tool, allowing more complex interactions. If you’re finding the default toolset limiting, it might be worth exploring these options.

In essence, while the Foliage tool doesn’t natively support logic in the same way Blueprints do, you can still create interactions by checking against foliage instances in your game logic

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