Animated Grass

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Whilst wind physics work very well for simulating cloth blowing in the wind it wouldn’t be very performance efficient for small objects in large quantities such as grass. As a result, Unreal has a simple grass wind node on its material editor that you can attach to the world position offset that fakes wind simulation by animating the grass swaying from side to side. Since this is an automated process it means that the developer does not have to individually key frame the animation which I imagine would require a skeletal mesh, which would be harmful to performance neither does the developer need to worry about making sure the animation look natural enough. The tool has enough variables to capture different wind conditions as well, you can recreate a gentle breeze or large gales depending on what values it’s fed. Overall this tool is easy to use and saves time and performance resources. I will almost certainly be using it for my project.



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