Why does my non-billboard grass no longer sway in the wind?

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For reasons unbeknownst to me, wind no longer seems to affect non-billboard terrain-grass (Grass Texture, not Detail Mesh) in a project I’m working on. If I enable the billboard checkbox for the grass, it sways forth and back without a care in the world, but as soon as I turn off that checkbox the grass freezes up and remains stiff, static and petrified.

No amount of settings tweaking, slider sliding, keyboard smashing, swearing or praying seem to make a difference for grass in my existing project - even if I create a new scene within that project, with a new terrain, import the standard terrain assets from scratch - the grass I paint on that terrain only sways in the wind if billboard checkbox is enabled.

However, if I create a new project from scratch, add a terrain to it, import the standard terrain assets and start painting grass on said terrain (exactly the same process as before), it will move perfectly fine in the wind, billboard checkbox enabled or not.

So my question is as follows: Why does my non-billboard grass no longer sway in the wind?

I had the same phenomenon. Especially in collision with unistorm. One project got corrupted and only setting the grass to billboards made it move. Either no solution yet found. Other non-corrupted projects didn't had this phenomenon. Even rebuild whole library - but didn't brought it back.

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Is checking the billboard box changing the shader by any chance? Wind animations are sometimes handled through shaders, but if the shader doesn't support it you will lose the animation. Or it could be that the shader you are using only supports it when billboarded. I don't really know, but it's something to look into.

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1 Answer

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Ho - nothing changes - except that the wind settings from the terrain are effctive or not. This only happens in conjunction with the unistorm system from blackhorizon. I assume that this system anyway sets the grass textures programmatically to billboard, when it takes control over the terrain’s wind settings and other terrain parameters. I assume, that the first time you toggle the billboard feature of the grass textures the control of unsitorm over the wind settings get broken.