Wind: Detail meshes are moved by wind back and forth, rather than swaying: how do I make them sway?

Questions & Answers
1

I made a terrain, painted it with some splat textures, then moved on to add some swaying grass. When using a "small bush" from the Unity package of foliage under resources just to test with, I noticed that once the area was previewed or run as a full app, that the grass would MOVE left/right instead of just tilting left/right to give it a swaying effect. How do I make the grass/other detail meshes sway/rotate slightly with the breeze, rather than being physically moved back/forth?

4

I just saw a forum post that mentioned that detail meshes should have the vertex color alpha painted to determine how much wind affects them.

So the official solution is to paint your vertex color alpha black at the bottom, and then some value at the top depending on much wind should affect it.

This seems to be a documentation bug in the Detail Mesh reference page.

6

For anybody trying to solve this probelm… here is a youtube video showing a fix, step by step…

8

Hi! I created a free asset in Assets Store that let’s you to prepare any mesh to be used in Unity Terrain as a detail mesh with a correct wind behavior: Bush or Grass bend as Detail Mesh | Terrain | Unity Asset Store

2

I needed to paint them as "detail textures" instead of "detail meshes" to achieve the desired swaying behavior. User error =P.

3

I have this problem too. As Steven 1 points out, is there a way to make the plants sway instead of moving?

5

I sort of solved this. What I did is use the tree panel and added the bushes and ferns as trees. This caused an info message in the console that said my billboards would not work if I didn’t change the shader to Nature Soft Occlusion. I went to each Bush/Fern model in the project panel and changed the shader to Nature/Tree Soft Occlusion Leaves. That gave me an acceptable result - a mesh with proper transparency and proper swaying behavior (doesn’t float across the ground). The warning message disappeared and billboards are working fine.

7

I’m still having this problem and watched the video and read all documentation I could find. I use blender and this is so ridiculous… no matter what I do, it doesn’t work. The detail meshes are still sliding even though I painted the weights correctly in blender. I wonder if I’m not exporting the weights properly… I wonder if anyone has actually figured this out for Blender. @ZeoBuzz @BjoUnity3d @glowingslab @KevalrOxy @God-at-play