Procedural Root & Vine Generator 4.0.0

Unreal Engine 5.4–5.8 · Win64

Version 4 adds cave roots, hanging vines and organic bridges, improves surface traversal and tube quality, and gives all four generators static export and animated runtime output.

Growth and surface traversal

• Cave / Underground roots spread across cave ceilings, descend walls and can continue along the floor. Place the actor inside the cave near its roof. This mode does not tunnel down from the terrain above. Existing Burrowing settings retain their saved identity under the new display name.
• Hanging vines start from supported undersides or ledges, descend through free spans and can reattach to nearby surfaces. Their shape is generated in the editor; growth playback does not simulate rope physics.
• Root and Vine starts emerge from their support surface. Climbing launches and child attachments follow the finished parent path, reducing loops that leave a wall and double back.
• Climbing roots spread onto a supported flat surface at the top of a wall. Cave ceiling paths have more gradual variation, and Surface roots can travel downward around edges.
• Wrapping vines follow flat surfaces and corners more smoothly. Anchors and fibers follow growth direction, with curved stems, tapered tips and embedded contact ends.

Tube quality and materials

• Reduced folded tubes, ribboning, abrupt pinching and large smoothing spikes near narrow branches and caps. Radius-aware turn and clearance checks reject or shorten paths that cannot support the chosen thickness.
• Added longer pointed tapers and improved attachment boundaries so child starts do not extend through the far side of the parent.
• Improved radius-aware bark mapping and parent-to-child texture flow. Bark Detail Radius Exponent, default 0.25, makes bark features moderately smaller on thinner branches; zero keeps approximately constant physical feature size.
• Optional junction fusion is available for Root, Vine, Barrier and Bridge. It defaults to off because it can greatly increase build time and geometry. Texture blending works with fusion off.
• The existing root and vine materials and textures remain included. Decorative detail meshes and their source files are not included; use your own meshes.

Organic bridges

• Added Root Structure, Vine Structure and Hybrid bridges with four bank anchors, editable guides, sag, structural rails and optional woven strands.
• Improved landing curves and assigned the existing Alder root material as the default.
• Bridges support VAT and Material / Shader playback, like Root, Vine and Barrier. Choose growth from End A, End B or both banks toward the middle.
• Runtime export hides the mature source so it does not cover the growth animation. Generate Bridge restores the source for editing.

Detail attachments

• Root, Vine, Barrier and Bridge share weighted mesh variants, placement rules, exclusion regions and growth-timed attachment playback.
• Set Up Detail Meshes opens a native preview window for existing Static Meshes or file imports. Calibrate facing, up axis and scale, save reusable setups, then add them to the selected generator. Imported meshes and setup assets belong to the project.
• Attachments scale with local branch radius. Start Along Spline and Stop Along Spline control placement bases; new rules stop at 0.8, leaving the final 20% without attachment bases. Meshes can extend beyond that boundary.
• Radius filters and side placement can restrict a layer to thicker branches. Facing Spread and Random Spin vary placement, while Flowers / Upward Lean biases suitable meshes toward world up.
• Static Mesh export now includes the generated attachments, their materials and authored UVs. Runtime exports retain instancing and appearance timing. High-resolution source meshes can make complete static bakes very large; bakes above five million triangles ask before proceeding.

Animation and export

• All four generators support Static Mesh export, shader growth and VAT playback. Shader growth does not require VAT textures; VAT export bakes the data required by its playback method.
• Improved reverse playback, loop and ping-pong boundaries, VAT interpolation and runtime material ownership.
• Sequencer Growth Progress tracks drive exported actors directly. Autonomous easing does not change keyed timing.
• Fixed proximity activation for Characters already inside the trigger at startup, repeated overlaps and one-shot rearming. Reset Growth rearms a one-shot trigger.
• Saved previews and exports retain authored paths, attachment placement and material slots more reliably after reopening the project.

Editor workflow

• The native PRG tab follows actor and component selection across generators and helper actors. Quick view keeps the main controls together; Simulation and Animation filters use their full names.
• Generate Paths + Mesh replaces generated paths. Refresh Mesh keeps edited paths and updates geometry. Bridge uses Generate Bridge. Export Static Mesh and Export Runtime Actor provide consistent output actions.
• Build status distinguishes changed settings, a usable preview and a failed build. Interactive property drags wait until release before generating again.
• Preset restore now states its effect: Restore Presets and Reset Actor replaces built-in rows and resets the actor. Custom-named rows remain.
• Included actor Blueprints for each supported engine version. PRG controls now use the EmbeddedTechno Slate styling and Titillium Web fonts.

Updating from V3

1. Back up the project and any customized plugin content, then close Unreal Editor. Install the package for your exact engine version.
2. Keep custom materials, textures and presets in your project if you want plugin updates to leave those copies alone. Updating plugin files can overwrite customizations made inside the plugin folder; there is no automatic merge or protection system.
3. Existing actor paths and the saved Burrowing mode remain compatible. Review the settings before regenerating: corrected sampling can change the generated result.
4. Use Generate Paths + Mesh, or Generate Bridge, to adopt the new path behavior. Refresh Mesh updates geometry on existing paths.
5. Regenerate static and runtime exports to adopt V4 geometry, details, texture mapping and bridge timing. Preserve old exports when their exact appearance must remain unchanged.
6. Re-export older bridges before using Bridge Growth Mode. Reverse Growth retracts an animation; Bridge Growth Mode chooses its starting bank.

Practical limits

Generation and baking are editor operations. Use exported assets for finished scenes and runtime playback. Mesh Density affects geometry cost; long, densely woven barriers can contain substantially more geometry than a small root system.

Surface following depends on support collision and trace settings. Different engine versions can resolve collision differently, so a locked seed does not guarantee identical geometry across engines. Custom materials must support PRG's growth and mapping data. Animated-normal baking is currently unavailable.

Documentation: https://www.embeddedtechno.com/prg

Documentation · Download release notes