I made a better tree, not perfect (it still has the weird branch in the upper left) but its more passable than the other tree I made.

I also found in unreal the “Foliage” system ( see https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/procedural-foliage-tool-in-unreal-engine ) which is the opposite of the “Landscape” system used for grass. Essentially it lets you spawn hundreds of a single actor and handles it externally from the normal actors.

The trees now have collisions!

The first thing I wanted to try getting working was having bits break off of the tree.

This can be done using unreal’s chaos destruction but I’m still messing around with the parameters. I tried the current tree and it just kinda falls apart really quick:

My hope is that when your running through the woods getting shot at a bunch of splinters will be flying through the air as bullets hit trees.

When applied to the whole forest you get a cool view of all of the tree’s falling apart slowly.

Maybe that would be cool for a menu or something, but really I need to make the chunks smaller and fix the split apart trigger so it doesnt just magically explode.