UV animation for foliage

Alright, this is my best attempt at recreating the logic, though it might not be perfect because it’s really hard to see some areas of the picture.

To answer your questions:

  1. That’s achieved through adding a noise to the UVs- it’s called a distortion shader. Ben Cloward has a great youtube video breaking it down if interested. The only difference is, it looks like he’s using a controlled version of the distortion method to drive a rotation instead of just the traditional add.

  2. It looks like he’s achieving this through the use of vertex colors. Individual leaves are pretty impossible to control- since you can’t rely on pixel or vertex data to reliably move an entire leaf. So, to get around this, usually you paint every leaf a different vertex color. These 0-1 values act as the perfect movement offset. Based on the movement of his leaves, it looks like he has painted the leaves very intentionally- like based off of their distance from the center- to drive leaf movement that appears in waves instead of completely random. You can also get a similar effect by just using a large world-aligned noise texture. You may see some slight distortion within the leaves, but this will achieve the same wave effect without all of the additional setup.

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