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2D Art Animating Foliage

Shurek

Grizzled Veteran
May 21, 2006
857
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www.darkesthourgame.com
Does anyone know if the RO version of the Unreal Ed allows for shader based static mesh movemet? I'm posting this here since the solution would most likely be a material based one rather than 3D or animation based. What comes to mind is the birch tree mesh in Baksan Valley which uses an oscillating texture on its limbs to simulate movement in the wind.

I'm wondering if the same approach could be applied to the textures on other foilage meshes including the deco layers.

The reason I bring this up is that I just bought BiA the other day (I know...traitor and blasphemer, that I am) and was looking at how all of the vegetation was swaying in the wind, including the grass textures and the ivy on the hedgerows. Delving into the SDK a bit more, I saw that GearBox had modified the editor to work with special shaders, including coding that affected hardware.

Barring any anything like that happening in this version of RO (maybe we'll get lucky with the Unreal 3.0 version of RO ;)), perhaps there's a more pedestrian solution that could be employed such as the example mentioned above from Baksan.

If so, maybe one of the TWI developers could respond to this thread with any thoughts, comments, or ideas.

Thanks!:)
 
I can't think of any reason why you couldn't use an oscillating or rotating texture (doesn't necessarily have to be a shader) as a skin for any kind of mesh. The main problem would be that the entire branch texture would oscillate (including where the branch joins the trunk). It is also contingent on the meshes that these texures go on being sheets rather than complex geometry, which I'm pretty sure they are for the kind of thing you want to 'animate'.

Another possibility might be to create a series of textures as 'frames' of an animation or even to have emitters with a series of subdivisions as the branches of a tree.

Alternatively you can wait for RO2 (if that's what it will be) which will be based on Unreal 3 and will therefore, hopefully, include Speedtree, which should make this kind of thing a lot easier.
 
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Nestor, guess I should have searched a little harder in the retail packages for that stuff, and I'll definitely take a look at them. Oh well, at least I learned how to create my own for future purposes. There's a deco grass texture (not FPH's Kolno texture, I swear) that I've run across that I applied to a sheet mesh that looks REALLY good. In fact, it looks sooooooo good that the player models look fake running through it.

The process really wasn't that hard to do overall. Took about 10 minutes per texture. I've found that working with materials is actually kind of fun :eek:

Sethodie: That's an interesting idea, though I wouldn't know how to go about doing it. Although the textures all move with the same velocity and amplitude, they are definitely not synchronized at all. The effect is pretty cool since one patch of grass is moving in one direction and the ones around it are all moving in their own opposite directions just as you would expect in real life. If you have any suggestions on randomization, they are certainly welcome.

Overall, the effects that I've been working towards look pretty realistic (relatively speaking in Unreal terms :D ). I'm pretty happy with the results and I'll be utilizing them when I get back to work on my Voronezh map this weekend. ;)
 
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All of the foliage, trees included, on Kolno were originally animated. They looked pretty nice, but they did cost a lot of fps, so they were removed. Unfortunately, there is no way that I know of where the textures can be desynchronized. I used two separate ocillators with different settings to get a good result.
 
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Moz, for what it's worth, I did notice the moving grass in your earlier version. But you guys are right, I did a few practice rounds on my refurbed Voronezh map last night and noticed a drop in the fps. Around 10% drop, in fact. I think I'll ditch the moving grass and keep the moving trees instead since there aren't many of them. Either that I'll reduce the density of the deco layer and see what happens.

Cheers! :D
 
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