This is a handy little tool I wrote to generate the vertex colors for a tree with vertex animation. Painting these colors isn’t much fun and can be a bit time consuming to get right. Hopefully this will allow me to create more vertex animated plants in a shorter time frame. Here’s a video of the tool and shader in action: You can see the tree’s vertex colors on the left in Unity, before and after generation in maya
I am hoping to add support for specific channels to be regenerated instead of the whole thing and some support for other foliage types. One thing to note if you try it out is that it currently is very specific in how it expects the branch models to be made. Here is an image of the expected branch:
Simply put, it’s pivot must be at 0,0,0 and it must face down the world X at 0 rotation. You are free to duplicate and rotate this obviously, but we want all the leaves to have an origin point like this so the generator doesn’t get confused.
Source Code:
| baseuiwindow.py |
| plantvertexcolorgenerator.py |
Also uploading the shader so you can test the effect yourself.
Unity Shader:
| phongnormalclipvertexanim.shader |