Recently our studio Squeeze (https://www NULL.squeezestudio NULL.com/) was tasked with creating some user acquisition ads for Super Cell’s Clash of Clans. I was responsible for the technical art systems in Unreal. This included wind and material systems as well as R&D for the ray traced Lumen rendering. It was a ton of fun and with any luck we’ll be at it again soon! They even let me drone on about some of the benefits of real time vs deferred rendering in the video above. There is a wind system I created that hooks into the grass, plants and trees. The FX artist was able to key the wind strength to align to his explosions giving the shots a more cohesive feel.

Later on I took the system I had developed for these ads and then improved upon it by implementing pivot painting on the grass. Pivot painting properly anchors the blade of each grass card to the ground. A lot of the time with material based wind effects you’ll get a general ‘waviness’ when wind is applied to an object, but it rarely looks correct. There was a little bit of cloth simulation being used here, but we kept it to a minimum as it can be very hard to art direct.