Pivot Painter Lab

Pivot Painter makes foliage move by rotating every branch and leaf around the point where it joins its parent. Unreal can play that data, but authoring it has meant a round trip through 3ds Max for each tree. Trees you buy or scan arrive as static meshes, and stay still.

• Unreal Engine 5.4 to 5.8.
• Bakes have to work with Epic's stock Pivot Painter 2 shader, so existing materials and tools keep working.
• Falling leaves and bending foliage have to run in packaged games, not only in the editor.
• Interaction runs through four slots in a material parameter collection: the four interactors nearest the player win.
• A forest must not sway in lockstep.

Pivot Painter Lab does the whole bake inside Unreal. It analyses the mesh, splits it into wind elements, builds the hierarchy, computes a pivot and a rotation axis for every piece, and bakes Pivot Painter 1 vertex data or Pivot Painter 2 textures to a copy, so the source asset is never touched.

A five-step wizard gets a first bake in a few clicks. It rates the mesh's complexity, asks four questions already filled in from the analysis, and shows the split before it commits. Behind it, a router picks the detection and hierarchy recipe for trees, bushes, grass cards and props, and reports any fallback instead of hiding it.

On top of the bake: one material parameter collection drives the wind and the season for every tree in the scene; an octahedral impostor covers the far distance; falling leaves spawn from the canopy in Niagara and follow the wind; and foliage bends away from the player.

Version 1.0.1 shipped with its regression suite passing 44 of 44 cases. Pivot Painter wind also drives the hero at the top of this site.