Dynamic Wind Tool For Trees

This third portfolio piece of mine was completed in 3 weeks half-time as a collaboration with Graphic Arts student Elin Mannerdahl at The Game Assembly, who created the environment shown.

My contribution was focused on specifically developing a procedural tool that sets up trees to work inside Unreal Engine using Pivot Painter material function solutions. For clarification, Pivot Painter stores the pivot and rotational information in the model's textures. Those textures can then be referenced inside of Unreal's shader system to create interactive effects. The goal was to make the environment feel more dynamic and alive by adding subtle, customisable background motion.

One of the key challenges was finding a balance between visual richness and performance, especially for secondary background effects. That’s why I chose a Pivot Painter-based solution, to offer more detail than a simple wind shader, yet remain light enough performance wise to be used efficiently in larger environments.

As for the smaller foliage, like grass and bushes, I used a wind shader. Since these don’t require hierarchical detail, I found a simpler motion to be sufficient.

In addition to the wind system, I also created the ocean seen in the background. It’s an ocean spectrum made in Houdini imported using vertex animated textures. The animation is looped and tileable to work seamlessly without visible borders.

Big thanks to Elin for the lovely environment and collaboration on this piece!
https://www.artstation.com/elinmannerdahl