I am doing a senior project for college and the idea I currently have is to try to emulate a realistic wind system, like earth, inside the engine and have it manipulate actor’s and cause them to animate depending on the wind variables. I know that there are things like speedtree and other static animations that simply loop to simulate wind, this is not what I want to accomplish. I would like to be able to have a random wind directions with random strength like real life. This would result in trees or other objects having dynamic animations depending on the wind. I would like to know if this is possible.
The engine will not stop you from making this possible. You will need to program this simulation though. It’s not about whether the engine can do it, but can you. Only you can answer that.
You can programmatically affect animations in the engine as it is now. You have more than one way you can. One suggestion is to add a direction and strength variable to you animation blendspace. Look at the locomotion examples at the direction and speed variables, but alter there effect for what you want.
Do the trees given to you in the engine have bones? Do you need bones to animate the trees like I want? If the engine’s trees don’t have bones will I have to create my own static meshes / animations with bones?
Just so you know, SpeedTree is not a canned animation. It computes in real-time, and updates to wind strength and direction changes.
These are decisions you will need to make for yourself for your project, whether speed tree is sufficient for you or not. Yes, you need to have rigged and skinned models to animate in 3D.
Yes and I can confirm that as well, just search in the engine source for “FSpeedTreeWind” and you’ll see what is involved, it is not a simple problem.
I gave a try to achieve this using materials. And I could do it upto some extent, but still not perfect. I could develop a global directional wind system that affect all the vegetation alike. here is the video.
