VERTEX OFFSET AMBIENT ANIMATION
To give our environment more life and make it feel , we decided very early on we would have slight wind on our plants, as well as some leaf particles falling from trees.
To achieve this I decided to use vertex offset. Using vertex colours I painted the areas I didn’t want to be affected by wind, and the areas I did, white. In Shaderforge, I used a combination of time, sin, and panner nodes to create a flapping in the breeze.
However one this same shader was assigned to all of the plant geometry, all the plants seemed to be moving in unison, and there wasn’t enough variation in the wind. To combat this, we created a world position node in Shaderforge. This resulted in the geometry being affected by the shader differently depending on where the object is in world space.
However this created an issue where the plants at the world space origin would be moving at the desired magnitude, but the further away from the origin they became progressively more violent.
To fix this, our programmer did a bit of maths with nodes to manipulate the world space coordinates so instead of just increasing, it bounced between two values. This allowed the environment to have variance in animation on a sin wave, instead of a linear progression.
by SERENA