Start with a Procedural Vine Actor
Procedural Vines builds branching stems beside nearby collision surfaces. Place a Procedural Vine Actor, edit its Settings, and use Regenerate to rebuild. The actor supports procedural leaf quads, one instanced leaf mesh, or a collection of leaf mesh variations.
The separate Vine Climb Component adds collision-based surface traversal to a Character. It needs input bindings and a compatible collision setup; the vine actor alone does not make a player climb.
Choose a workflow
Swipe the table to read every column.
| Topic | What you will do |
|---|---|
| Place and regenerate | Create your first surface-following cluster and save the generated result. |
| Seeds and branching | Control root placement, repeatable variation, branching, meander and sag. |
| Surfaces and openings | Configure collision traces and world-space exclusion boxes. |
| Stem shape and materials | Set taper, smoothing, root flare, irregularity and bark UVs. |
| Leaf rendering | Choose procedural quads or instanced meshes and tune the matching controls. |
| Runtime and performance | Queue regeneration, wait for completion and read generation timings. |
| Demonstration level | Explore the feature stations and their runtime controls. |
| Character climbing | Connect grab, movement, release and jump-off inputs. |
Requirements and scope
This documentation targets Unreal Engine 5.8. Enable Procedural Vines and its Procedural Mesh Component engine dependency. The plugin provides a runtime C++ module. Demonstration maps and scene assets belong to the separate example project.
Growth describes geometry generation. Regeneration does not animate a vine extending over time. The plugin does not provide wind, static-mesh export, baking, character animations, hand/foot IK or replicated climbing. It does not continuously resimulate against moving or deforming target geometry.
Distances below use Unreal centimetres at actor scale (1, 1, 1); speeds use centimetres per second. Settings defaults refer to a newly created plugin actor or component, not the customized demonstration actors.