Interactive Tree Creator for UE4

Have a look at Interactive Tree Creator (ITC) from S. Kreze, which helps us to produce really versatile 3d trees, which can be used for real-time production. The tool provides a wide variety of generation parameters, helping to find the right number of branches and twigs, leaves meshes. There’s an intersection blending function, support for impulse force reaction with tweakable parameters, and constant force reaction feature, plus wind effects. This helps you to build same wild moving trees you see in Witcher: Wild Hunt.

The developers also added customizable tree chopping function, with physical simulation, ground impact effects and falling leaves, debris. It looks pretty cool. If you feel like you need more control with the functions, you can can always use hand editing tools for trunk and main branches or play around with the leaf branch texture generator. However, you might never use these functions cause the plugin comes with a bunch of game-ready presets.

If you still wondering if this is worth your money, check out this comparison of Interactive Tree Creator and Dynamic Tree & Plant Generator.

Both these systems are based on completely different generation systems & are aimed for different workflows.

Both have their uses in different projects/project stages, depending on what you need.

Dynamic Tree & Plant Generator best suited for easy, very fast generation and intuitive drag & drop prototyping. Of course, it can also serve as a final asset generator with many fully dynamic features.

Interactive Tree Creator best suited for final tree asset creation, based on instanced static mesh workflow. Generated trees can be converted into a regular static mesh & used with instanced foliage, e.g. with UE Foliage Tool and thanks to the custom system they can still have almost all of the dynamic features from DT&PG.

ITC is focused purely on tree generation, without the plant system from DT&PG.

Here are the unique aspects of each tool.

Dynamic Tree &Plant Generator:

-Drag & drop instantly generated assets, ready to use immediately.

-Dynamic lianas.

-Easy to use plant generator.

-Each fruit is treated as a separate object. (ITC uses an approximated fruit fall system with the ability to limit max fallen fruits. Fruits are treated as separate objects after falling -so it’s still possible to e.g. pick them up in your game system)

-Tree chopping at any trunk point. (ITC uses an automatically generated ‘chop stage’meshes that allow for chopping progression system, but they can be chopped at only one point)

Interactive Tree Creator:

-More possibilities & control over tree generation. Possibility to hand-edit main trunk & branches.

-Seed based procedural generation.-Better final performance thanks to the ISM workflow. Optimized for both GPU and CPU.

-Branch & stump mesh blending to eliminate harsh texture transitions.-Included tree billboard generator & leaf map texture generator.

-Most of the dynamic features from DT&PG are still here, e.g. Dynamic wind, chopping, force reaction (+ new ‘constant’ force effect) & falling leaves & fruits (+ new falling ‘tree debris’ like little twigs or bark parts).

-New: ‘Idle’ falling leaves, not only from force reactions.

-New, better force & wind reaction effects with the possibility to spawn specified ‘tree debris’ that fall under force influence, e.g. little twigs, bark parts, or any specified custom meshes.

-Improved chopping & tree falling effects.

Interactive Tree Creator and Dynamic Tree & Plant Generator were created by S. Kreze. This tool is not yet available for download, but the release is close.