I am creating a modular tree in Unreal Engine 5.7.4. Nanite is turned on.
I have several (approx. 10) trunks, branches and branchlets which should be used randomly. I have made them in Blender and I have their splines in a .CSV file. There is one CSV file per asset (trunk, branch) with position_x, position_y, position_z, SplineIndex and PointIndex. If the branches fork there are multiple splines with a spline ID in the .CSV file.
The modular tree shall be used in PCG with distance culling for an open world landscape. I want to make use of the Performance improvements that come with HISM.
The branches are only at the excentric top of the tree trunk and I truncated the splines accordingly already , branchlets are supposed to spawn off the branches. I also want to randomize the component (trunk, branch, branchlet) scale. The target is effectively to make the tree so random that in the open world it seems like all trees are individual trees.
I have already tried to implement the modular tree in the same PCG Graph that I use for spawning the tree many times in the open world and that failed for a multitude of reasons.
I tried to use Google AI to help me come up with a Blueprint that does what I want, but I fail really early in the process. It never comes up with a working solution. I played around with Construction scripts a little bit, but Google AI was very insistent that this would lead to too many calls and would not allow performance optimization that comes with HISM.
Is anyone able to provide good references to tutorials for such a problem or provide hints on how to build such a modular tree?