Ben, you're a treasure. Your tutorials break down the complex into simple steps that we can learn a ton from by following, and build up our own game dev understanding. Thanks!
I continue being torn between jumping into unread to try stuff out or watching more videos continue to expanding my awareness of different techniques! This stuff is really cool
Excellent break down from simple to more complex through the progression of the video. I wouldn't have imagined this is how the effect was created. Thinking about how I can apply snow and wind based on some previous tutorials.. I'll give that a go. 🌿
if the branch and leaves are rendered from offline renderer like vray, you can have render aov or elements, different colors for different leaves, gradient between leaf root and tip, even motion vectors . then use them with this tutorials technique, it's going to look amazing.
I just came back to this video to grab the leaf textures, really appreciate that update. I also just put a shout out for your channel on the ue4 subreddit as I think your doing a great job and deserve more attention. I dont have any major swagger with the ue4 community or anything but I hope the post helps in some way and that your channel success helps motivate you to make even more shader stuff :)
I think I learned more about materials in UE in the last 15 minutes than in the 3 weeks before 😅 One thing confues me though... For the mask, you split the components and then add them back together in the next step, what is the reason behind that?
I'm very late to this, but for anyone still wondering, it's because the mask texture is a 3Vector, and the texture coordinates node outputs a 2Vector. And you can't add a 2vector to a 3vector. So splitting the components and then adding them together lets you convert the mask texture information to a 2vector, which you can then add to the texture coordinates.
Wouldn't it be easier to make the animated leaves in a program like After Effects and just bring the animated texture in the material? I really want to know if that can be done.
The advantage of the method I'm showing here is that it uses very little additional texture memory. If I understand your suggestion correctly, you would be rendering out individual frames of the looping leaf wiggle animation. That would either require a very large atlas texture (flipbook texture) or lots of individual frames. Either way, it's a lot more texture memory - and probably not worth it. But it would look nice!
FOA Thank you so much for the tutorial. I have a question please. What if we want to use a custom normal map (normal map of branch texture) with this setup? Where would that fit?
Hi Ben, thanks for this amazing tutorial. I find that my shaders by default seem to have 30 or more so intructions than the shaders youre making. Ive followed all of your previous videos up until this one. Do you have any ideas why this might be happening?
Thanks Ben for sharing so much! I really understand alot from watching your video. I saw some video people used Pivot Painter is it the process the same as this method?
Pivot Painter is for moving the vertices. This technique is for animating the UVs. They both accomplish similar goals. I'd recommend using both techniques together if you have the performance budget for it.
Hi Ben, still trying to understand all the different functions and how to manipulate this in different ways. How would I go about having some leaves moving in different directions? The sine wave makes them all go from 0,0 to 1,1. I'm trying to make more of a random non-repeating pattern like we did in your distortion shader earlier. But I'm getting a lot of problems with Float2 and Float3 not working well together and just overall struggling a bit to grasp the concepts.
Multiply each leaf offset with (1.0, 1.0), (-1.0, 1.0) and (1.4, 0.0) vectors before adding them together with the texture coordinates. By default if you add a scalar to a Vector2 you add to both components causing the diagonal movement.
You can also use time to sample a (low res) noise texture for a pseudo random movement instead of using sine. Possibly there's a node built in for that.
Bro you are fantastic at teaching and explaining and your speed is on point lol some people are really fast! Please keep them coming! You are a HUGE help!
Hi Sir! The shader on my side has 240 instructions How can I optimize it. means there are same nodes used as you used in the shader but it is less than 150 instructions on your side
This effect reminds me Watch Dogs 1 leafs movement. May be I am wrong but even RDR2 leafs are just gradient map moving of whole branch polygons. I almost decided to make LOD0 tree with individual leafs for movement like this for my VR project but your video saved my forest map :D Thank you very much again.
With the mask that you paint, you can define exactly what moves and what doesn't - so if there's an area where it's moving and you don't want it to move, just erase the red/green/blue from the mask in that spot.
