Blender Environment Artist v2:Exporting the tree in Unity for animation

[Jodha]

I was wondering how to set up the tree for making them move with the wind in unity? Is there a section which will be shown in this course?

[FedPete]

I think it is more a programmable feature in Unity.

[NP5]

More a Unity issue. Movement with wind is not covered in the Blender course, or has not been yet, and I doubt will be. I expect Unity has its own physics systems and not matching Blender’s.

[Jodha]

no, if you own some unity assets you will find there is was to make the trees in modelling software to be ready for wind simulation for game engines. Just asking what way is that?

[FedPete]

There are (commercial) Blender plugins or features (sapling tree) to create a tree.
If you have a tree then you can use Blender particle system to populate the tree with leaves.

Leaves will move with the tree branches if you animate them. Tree leaves can have their own individual animation physics. Blender has some default physics utils like push and pull gravity or wind.
But those are Blender specific tools of the trade.

[zeRgenTa]

I found this on the official unity forums, I hope it helps answer your question. It’s a few years old, so they may have changed it by now.

[Csf91]

For modern unity versions, using URP or HDRP, you can make a shader to simulate wind.

Edit, small addition to the shader mention: To improve performance if becomes a problem, set up LODs, and have only the “closest/highest resolution” ones have the wind shader. the other 1/2 or so lower resolution ones can be “just the model” with a non-windy shader.

The other way i can think of, maybe more old fashioned and i guess also less performant would be to give bones to the main branches, and either animate it, or use what’s called a dynamic bone (which then uses a springbone kind of script).

[bOBaN]

@Csf91

For modern unity versions, using URP or HDRP, you can make a shader to simulate wind.

This is correct answer. And even for older version and other game engines like unreal engine. You usually have 10s, 100s or even 1000s of trees in the scene, which are part of environment/background, and I doubt there is more efficient way to do it than on the shader side.

Edit: ah, and to add a bit. This is not very simple and well documented process. Depending on exactly how given shader for wind in unity works you might for example do some additional work on the tree (like vertext painting).

[Jodha]

yeap that is what I am doing atm. Shader graph is really good tool in unity for making lots of interesting effects and such