Animating swaying trees in Unreal 3

easterislandnick

Hi, My next unreal level in unreal is going to be a forested canyon and I was wondering how I might go about animating the trees swaying in the wind. Are there any tutorials about adding animations to static meshes knocking around as I cant seem to find any. In the past I have animated branches with a panning texture but I want something slightly more realistic. I won't be animating them myself, a friend at work is going to be doing them in Max.

Any ideas?

Thanks, Nick

Kawe

well. as the name suggests. static meshes are static. you could animate them separately with kismet/matinee but uhm.. ya. maybe better to import an animated tree using bones and stuff instead. not entirely sure how you do that. gotta use the actorx exporter I believe.

easterislandnick

"Static meshes are static"!!!!!!!!!! I feel a bit stupid for not considering that! Any ideas what would be the best way of approaching it?

kamfriek

can you have vertex shaders on static meshes in UE3?You could add some sine-controlled sway to geometry with that,increasing it along y-axis.Ben Cloward swayed grass quads like that,but it is essentialy the same thing:


Out.position = In.position;

if(In.texCoord.y < 0.9) {
Out.position.x += sin(Out.position.x * frequency + (time/TimeScale)) * amplitude* 1-In.texCoord.y;
}




Look into UE3 documentation for the correct syntax,this one is copied from virtools.

sprunghunt

you could use speedtree. It has automatic swaying.