On the wind, I’m using an upside-down hanging vertex animation, which you can find in Ryan Dowling Soka’s blog. It looks so good, I’ve used it forever, really. I don’t use a vertex color mask for it as he does. I’ve used a distance from the origin point for the gradient mask, as I think it is somewhat easier to control, and I free up the vertex color for other stuff if I want to use it. I’m also using a material parameter collection so I can have global control of the wind strength.
Conclusion
This project took me about 2 weeks to finish. The main challenge was really learning how to speed up my Substance 3D Designer workflow, as I knew from the start it would be a bit of a bottleneck for me. Also, learning how to use SpeedTree was a good challenge to take. I learned that a good process will give you a lot of confidence for visualizing the final environment. Also, you can do a pretty nice environment with some very simple parts, as long as they match well together, which actually saves you a lot of time.
It is common for a bigger project to focus too much on detail way too early or way too much, so it is better to evaluate your work on the scene, in the angles that are going to be seen, and how it matches with the rest of the scene, instead of evaluating it isolated from everything else. Also, if things are not working, you can spot them early and fix them, so you minimize the frustration of spending a lot of time on something that didn’t work. That’s why proxies and a nice process will help you judge your work in context. I think that is great.