Luckily Unreal has a few material functions already set up for this, so that just needs to be added to the material as follows.Īnd then, when a material instance is created it exposes a number of pre made wind options.
Now all we need is to call these pivot points in the material editor. Then the mesh can now be exported as normal and imported to Unreal as a static mesh. exr texture, and the X vector coordinates to a 8bit RGBA. When the hierarchy is processed, it bakes the relevant pivot points to one 16bit RGBA. I also tweaked the vertex paint using the Vertex Alpha Painter tool. Then it was just a matter of setting up a realistic hierarchy and click “Process The Selected Object Hierarchy”. I ended up placing all mine manually as I found it produced better results in this case, but I can see the automated process being much more useful on much fuller trees. one particularly cool one is the ability to extract leaves that touch a specific brand and align their pivot to the correct position. I may actually write a bit more about how to use it in the future, because its simple one you know what you are doing.
The pivot painter script was actually very easy to use, but the documentation online is very difficult to follow. So I set out to learn 3ds Max and Pivot Painter in one go. The issue, however, is that it only works with 3ds Max, and I have never used Max before. Then each of these pieces can be rotated about their respective pivot points creating wind. Each branch that grows from the tree will also have its own pivot (stored in a texture), as will each frond that grows from that. Basically, when creating a tree, the tree will have its own pivot point. The possible applications for this are huge, but I decided to start small with a tree. What Pivot Painter allows you to do is bake multiple pivot points into a texture, which can then be read in Unreal Engine’s material editor. Typically when you import a mesh to Unreal the pivot point for the entire mesh is a 0,0,0. So, time to learn something new! PivotPainter is a 3ds Max plugin created by Epic Games and can be used in tandem with some magic UE4 material functions to create some amazing wind shaders. Plus, I know how to do all these things already. I debated just making the trees in Maya and adding some basic vertex wind, like SimplGrassWind in Unreal, but the results are not great and repetition is very visible. SpeedTree is always a good choice, but it definitely has it’s issues, and it is more suitable to a large scale project. I debated a number of approaches for creating trees.
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