As a humble hobby dev, I'm asking our allknowing Mods how they would handle primitive foliage on low poly trees. What would be the most effective way, when you want them part of interactive trees to chop down etc.? Are Multimeshes helpful in this matter?
Creating Foliage
The best way would probably to have it as part of the tree mesh itself ideally.
If you have a tree mesh without leaves and you want to dynamically add them, then I'd say it varies. If you have all the foliage as a single mesh, then using a MeshInstance to add the leaves to each tree is probably fine, but if the foliage is on the per-leaf/group-of-leaves, then you will probably want to look into using a MultiMesh or a Particle system so you can have many leaves on each tree without poor performance. If you use a MultiMesh or Particle node, you'll want it to be a child of the MeshInstance containing the low-poly tree, so if it gets chopped down and falls the leaves will fall with the tree.
It's a good idea to use Alpha Scissor for foliage. Using transparency can look better, but causes issues and can cost a lot of performance.
Followed some Cloud Volume tutorial instead. Want to create a game that runs on weaker systems like my Surface. Alpha scissors etc. slowed my Surface down to infinity, couldnt even join the leaves.