Foliage Shader

<cat>Material.ShaderList</cat>
<title>Foliage Shader</title>

# Procedural Wind Animation

<upload src="a5727/8db3ad8056cad39.gif" size="8802419" name="foliage2.gif" />

The foliage shader supports procedural wind animation using vertex colors, to turn it on look for this feature in the material editor:

<upload src="a5727/8db3aa4dba1ae94.png" size="4258" name="image.png" />

## Vertex Color

<upload src="a5727/8db3aa49bf0bbc8.png" size="699590" name="image.png" />

The intensity and variation of foliage movements are defined by each RGB channel in vertex colors as follows:

**Red channel**: used for animation of smaller or peripheral parts of vegetation (leaves). Bright parts are animated, and dark parts are stiff.

**Green channel:** which parts of branches can be bent, brighter parts indicate bendable portions and dark parts stiff portions.

**Blue channel**: used for per-leaf phase variation - this is to de-synchronize the movement of different leaves. This should match across entire leaves.

<note>After you turn on foliage animation on the material, the model will need to be force recompiled - this will make sure the vertex color stream gets baked into the compiled model.</note>

## Material Parameters

<upload src="a5727/8db3aa45a9cd325.png" size="14715" name="image.png" />

* **Branch Amplitude**: How much the branches bend (multiplied by the green channel)
* **Branch Frequency**: How frequently the branches bend (multiplied by the wind speed)
* **Edge Amplitude**: How much the leaves flutter (multiplied by the red channel)
* **Edge Frequency**: How frequently the leaves flutter (multiplied by the wind speed)
* **Trunk Deflection**: A scale factor of how much the tree bends with the wind
* **Trunk Deflection Start**: The height at which the tree begins to bend from

## Global Wind Parameters

Currently wind speed and direction is controlled by the following convars:

* `r_world_wind_strength` - default: 40.0
* `r_world_wind_dir` - default: 0.707 0.707 0.0

This will change in the near future to be game / map configurable.

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