ok so i eased my curiosity and tested the feasibility of doing actual foliage bending. I’m not a fan of the material displacement approach. It looks cheap and i much rather have static objects than faked bending.
This was a quick 5 minute job so yes there are kinks and some jitters.
What i found. Performance impact was null. Due to having a stop simulation. It only simulates when you are in the plants vicinity. Much like the Crytek’s approach. However theirs were as it made use of vertex colors to determine bending limits.
This eliminates the need to go and modify constraint values. Lets all daydream for a few seconds about how totally amazing it was setting up bendable foliage. Ahhhhh.
However… i wont continue researching or perfecting this as Blueprints cannot be painted with the foilage tool. If / when that is implemented i will resume this direction. But for now… it was fun testing it and seeing that it would actually work.