Yep, that’d be a good way to do it, I actually have a friend who accomplished something similar, sadly I don’t know C++ so I am unable to replicate it. The closest I can get to it is having the actors swap themselves out with cheaper dummy actors whose only logic is to represent the visual of the tree by using a static mesh, and then to replace itself with a more logical, interactive actor when the player reaches a certain vicinity or hits the tree. I would of course need to run tests to see how this would perform, and I’ll likely do so this weekend.
Cheers!