Start with a Procedural Vine Actor
Procedural Vines builds branching stems beside nearby collision surfaces. Place a Procedural Vine Actor, edit its Vine Seeds, Vine Growth and related Details groups, 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. |
| Reuse presets | Apply a supplied starting point or save your own growth rules. |
| 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. |
| Leaf wind | Set up the supplied leaf materials and tune their wind parameters. |
| Runtime and performance | Queue regeneration, wait for completion and read generation timings. |
| Growth playback | Reveal or retract cached vine paths, pause playback and control its speed. |
| Demonstration level | Explore the feature stations and their runtime controls. |
| Overgrown Sanctuary | Read the separate environment's source-art notes and vine setup workflow. |
| 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.
Regenerate computes a vine's complete paths. The separate growth playback controls reveal or retract geometry along those cached paths. They do not simulate biological growth, deform a tentacle skeleton or continuously resimulate moving target geometry. The supplied leaf materials offer adjustable wind sway. Stems stay rigid. The plugin does not provide static-mesh export, baking, character animations, hand/foot IK or replicated climbing.
Distances below use Unreal centimetres at actor scale (1, 1, 1); character speeds use centimetres per second and growth playback speed uses normalized progress per second. Settings defaults refer to a newly created plugin actor or component, not the customized demonstration actors.