Dynamic Wind System Questions

Development Rendering
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Hi, I’m currently evaluating the usage of the dynamic wind system and procedural foliage for a project. While initial results are promising, there are still a lot of open questions that prevent us from using it right now. I’m aware that these features are still in an early state, and more features and documentation are to come, but to make a decision now whether to use them, I’d like to to know about the systems and the planned roadmap.

I’ve compiled a list of questions:

- Are there plans to make the dynamic wind system available for ‘normal’ skeletal meshes that aren’t constructed using the Procedural Vegetation Editor? The PVE and the reliance on presets is a big point of concern in our art department and is currently keeping us from switching to skinned foliage meshes. Knowing that a tree mesh can be built and rigged in any 3D software and then be used with the wind system would make the switch easier, because then we would have a fallback to be able to react to even to very specific art direction requests. The existence of the Convert Pivot Painter Tree to Skeletal Mesh blueprint function seems to imply that this is possible, but I didn’t get it to work so far, and I guess I would still need a json file containing the matching wind skeletal data? Is there some documentation (planned) on how to create this data?

- Related to that, how easily can the dynamic wind system be used for non-foliage assets like flags, ropes, wind chimes, etc? Everything I’ve seen so far only mentions foliage, but I guess it could be used for all sorts of objects?

- Right now, working with procedural vegetation is very opaque, and I’m wondering if there are specific reasons for that. In the skeletal mesh asset details panel, I can only see some select settings of the dynamic wind skeletal data, but there’s no way to see which simulation group contains which bones, and since the simulation groups are also not named, figuring out which group is responsible for which part of the mesh is difficult. If the data got imported from a json file, the path to the json file isn’t shown as usual when importing files into Unreal.

The same is true for procedural vegetation assets: When opening them, I don’t see all the information contained in them, and I don’t know which file they originate from, as the import path isn’t stored. As a result, I always feel like I’m missing critical information when working with these assets, because I don’t know where the data is coming from. Any plans to make this more transparent?

Thanks for your time!

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Hey there! I think the best way to think about the state of the MegaPlants ecosystem (Procedural Vegetation Editor, DynamicWind) right now is as a very tightly integrated framework. In order to get it all to play nicely together, there’s a lot of assumptions and contracts that have to be enforced at every step of the process in order to achieve the final result of Instanced Skeletal Meshes assembled with the PVE to animate in reaction to some kind of wind force.

With the 5.7 release, the plan was more or less to get something into peoples’ hands to start working with and get feedback on. Then in future versions start to open up the framework a bit more so users can further tune DynamicWind, and potentially even incorporate interactable foliage, as well as supporting the creation of your own PVE presets or importing custom foliage from DCC. Unfortunately, I don’t have any info to share on the timeline or scope of that work.

It’s probably worth mentioning that some folks on YouTube have figured out how to create their own presets by reverse-engineering the JSON format for all this, but that’s not exactly the workflow that the team is hoping users adopt.

In short, you’re not wrong to feel like you’re missing something. And yes, in long term the hope is to make this more open and transparent.

In the meantime, if you haven’t seen them yet here’s a few resources from Quixel and Epic that might help: