Introduction and Setup

1.1 What is Forest Tools?

Forest Tools is the Ultimate Scattering System for Unreal Engine. It is a comprehensive procedural generation suite designed to help you instantly create dynamic, realistic environments. Whether you need creeping ivy hugging your walls, hanging lianas bridging between trees, or dense foliage scattered across landscapes, splines or static meshes, Forest Tools handles it all—including GPU runtime scattering(Landscape only) for high performance.

1.2 Required Engine Plugins

Forest Tools relies on several built-in Unreal Engine features to function correctly. Before using the tool, you must ensure the following plugins are enabled in your project.

Go to Edit > Plugins and search for the following to enable them:

• Procedural Content Generation Framework (PCG)

• PCG External Data Interop

• PCG Geometry Script Interop

• PCG Biome Core

• PCG Biome Sample

• ProceduralMeshComponent

Note: You will need to restart your Unreal Engine editor after enabling these plugins.

Note1: Enabling the ForestTools plugin will automatically enable those plugins for you.

1.3 Locating the Demo Maps

To help you get started immediately, interactive demo levels are included directly inside the plugin. These levels act as a live showcase where you can reverse-engineer the setups and see the optimal parameter values in action.

How to find them:

1. Open your Content Browser.

2. Click the Settings gear icon in the top right corner of the Content Browser.

3. Check the box for Show Plugin Content.

4. Scroll down your folder list on the left side until you see the ForestTools Content folder.

5. Open the folder and navigate to the LEVELS folder to load the example levels.

Note: This will copy all the essential plugin’s content into your project’s Content folder.