Animation

[friggog]

Long term goal of wind sway animation, probably using armatures.

Seems that the Sapling implementation does almost exactly what we need. I.e. iterate over the curve (up to a level) and add an armature using the bezier points.

Hopefully using this as a basis and the wind sway equations from the original paper we should be able to do this relatively easily.

[samipfjo]

This would be useful for animating trees manually, but at least in game development land tree animation is frequently done by shaders using vertex colors. Vertex coloring shouldn't take too long to throw together and is certainly less finicky than bones, so I'm going to give that a shot first.

[jayfield1979]

I agree @luketimothyjones , skeletal meshes for trees in game engines is totally overkill unless they're like a super hero asset. Having both systems would be awesome however.

Incidentally, Unreal Engine makes use of Pivot Painter 2 for stuff like this: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/AnimatingObjects/PivotPainter/PivotPainter2/ It's a MaxScript, but something similar in Blender would be amazing.

If you were targeting Unreal Engine specifically, you could probably apply for an Epic MegaGrant: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants they'd love something like this for Blender :)