CG Shaders – Vertex Animated Wind

This one is a little different than the last vertex animated shader. It is based on Crytek’s implementation of plant animation as seen here. It gave me a nice opportunity to try out triangle waves, which are cheaper than sine waves and look better in this case (personally i find sin waves make the plants look like they are underwater while traingle waves look a bit more “snappy”).The shader animation is based on a passed in wind direction in world space, and can be controlled with vertex colors. It is a bit touchy and varies a bit more than i would like due to scale differences between maya and unity, although these could be avoided with a strict control of import scaling to unity. Otherwise it changes the usable strength and size ranges a bit.