Interactive Foliage Systems for UE4

Sander Vander Meiren has demonstrated his new interactive foliage system for Unreal Engine 4.

You may remember Sander from a little Uncharted-inspired scene he showed last year. He kind of continues his work with natural environments, this time presenting a system, which makes all the foliage in the level interactive. Unfortunately, he’s not distributing this product, but you can still check out the feature list.

Features:

– physically based collisions (spawnin and despawning physics assets)

– vertex shader to add “Floatyness”

– Working physics actors (forces and impulses)

– Fire propagation with foliage destruction

Watch the leaves and grass bend and burn.

The whole scene was set up in UE4, while the assets were created with some 3DS Max and Substance Painter magic.

UPD: The artist has released the cleaned up version of the foliage system’s project files and a user guide on how to change it to make it work with other foliage.

He also wrote a paper on his thought process of solving interactions with foliage.

Get the project files