How to Make Growing Trees?

Pangahas

Hi so I was wondering if someone can help me in creating a growing tree system/cycle inside UDK. A tutorial or a link would be most appreciated or at least point me in the right direction since I have little to no knowledge about coding stuff.I can pretty much only do basic Kismet like toggleable light, doors etc. and that's about it.

So I'm planning on making a level with trees and plants.I would be placing them by hand and basically I want them to grow overtime like in this video.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgZDdroI77Y"]UDK Growing and Shrinking Tree Actor - YouTube[/ame]

I'm thinking of having like 4 stages: sapling>small tree/plant>mature tree>dead version.Once it dies I want my handplaced plant mesh to be removed from the game and have a sapling grow within x ranged from it, rinse and repeat.

Again i have limited knowledge of how coding works inside UDK, so its unclear to me how easy or hard it is to implement like in the video.I would really appreciate it if someone can help me with this one,is it as simple as swapping between meshes?scaling stuff in Matinee?

Neavah

I imagine you could set this up with matinee, and kismet.

While it might be done with coding - I would give matinee a try and see if you can reproduce it.
The trees just look like they're scaling, and hiding/unhiding the appropriate meshes.

when your tree dies, I would try just hiding that mesh, and setting the location of all the hidden meshes to the new acorn location (so it can continue).
I don't know if you could make the acorn fall from a random spot 'x' distance from the tree, but you could always set up a few different specified locations for the acorn to fall and switch between those. (Get the location of the big tree, use that to set the location of the acorn).

It could be a somewhat complicated kismet chain (with matinee's, get locations, set location etc.) but I imagine it would be faster/easier for you to do than scripting.

Hope that helps