Just trying to wrap my head around how to start with this. How would you go about simulating vines reaching up through the ground and attaching to the player? Some sort of dynamic spline? Niagara ribbon maybe? Any help would be appreciated. Much more interested in technicality in solving this, not so much concerned with how “realistic” it is.
Niagara could work. A lot of games just use skeletal meshes for vines and tentacle-ish grabby things. Making a grab animation for a vine with like 4 bones in it shouldn’t be too painful, and you could use IK to fine tune the target location.
Dynamicaly created splines are awfully slow, do not use them in runtime (ie. do not create/calculate new spline). Not sure what epic is doing with them but they should not be as slow as they are.
Quite often they are just static meshes with animated UVs or vertex shader animation (such as VAT or procedural).