Descrizione
Right-click a Static Mesh and it sways correctly. Pivot Painter 2.0 foliage wind without the DCC round-trip.
One-click Pivot Painter bakes for trees, bushes and grass, a wind material, scene-wide wind and seasons, and falling leaves. UE 5.4–5.8.
Documentation
Right-click a Static Mesh. It sways correctly.
Pivot Painter is how Unreal makes foliage move believably: every branch and leaf rotates around its own pivot. Setting it up has traditionally meant hours in Houdini or Maya painting a hierarchy by hand. Pivot Painter Lab does it inside Unreal with one right-click, and gives technical artists a full workbench when they want to go deeper.
▸ Built for
Static-mesh vegetation you bought, scanned or modelled, that you want moving in wind.
Whole forests: per-instance variation so trees don't sway in lockstep, and one global wind control for the
scene.Seasons: a scene-wide leaf tint you can animate from Sequencer.
Falling leaves and foliage that bends away from the player, both shipping in your packaged game.
▸ The one-click bake
Right-click a Static Mesh (or a whole selection) → Pivot Painter → Bake. The plugin analyses the mesh, splits it
into wind elements, bakes the data and applies a wind material with the mesh's own textures harvested
automatically. Place the result in a level: it is already moving. Batch a whole folder the same way.
Every bake is checked before it's written. If a method can't produce a clean result, the tool falls back to the next one and tells you, rather than quietly giving you a broken bake.
▸ The Auto-Wizard
A guided five-step flow for the best bake in a handful of clicks:
Pick a mesh.
Assess: a plain-English complexity read-out (Simple / Moderate / Complex / Advanced) with the reasons.
Four questions, pre-filled from the analysis: what is it (tree, bush, grass cards, rocks, prop…), how much wind, quality or performance, and orientation.
Preview the split: the mesh tints by detected element before you commit.
Bake and watch it sway live. Save the answers as a preset, or open the Full Lab to fine-tune.
▸ The Full Lab, for expert control
A complete editor with a 3D viewport, the element list, the hierarchy tree and manual tools.
Detect elements by material section, by connected islands, with Smart-Cut for welded sculpts (trunk vs
branches by surface angle), or Auto-Pick to try each and keep the best.Paint roles: Support Wood, Leaf, Vine, Flower, Static or Ignore. The classifier guesses from slot names and
geometry; you correct it where needed.Build the hierarchy: Topology or Skeleton-First; pin a root, lock a parent link.
Bake PP1 (vertex data) or PP2 (textures) to a non-destructive duplicate.
Every manual choice saves as a preset for the Batch Bake window.
▸ Wind that holds together
The included wind material drives up to four levels of hierarchy with separate controls for trunk, branches, twigs and leaves. It adds travelling gusts, trunks that bend rather than pivot stiffly at the base, shelter from crosswinds, leaf flutter, and per-instance variation so a forest doesn't sway in lockstep. A manual-time option keeps the motion in sync for Sequencer and renders, and optional animated normals make the lighting follow the bend.
▸ One asset for the whole scene's wind and seasons
A Material Parameter Collection holds the scene's wind strength, speed and direction, and its season. The seasonal tint keeps brightness, only touches leaves (bark never changes colour), and varies per tree so they don't all turn at once. Four console commands (EQLabsSeason.Summer, Spring, Autumn and Winter) switch a whole scene, and animating the blend in Sequencer gives you a season change on camera.
▸ Also in your game
Two features run in your packaged game:
Falling leaves — textured leaves drop from the canopy, drift with the scene's wind and take the season's colour.
Interactive bending — grass and bushes push away from the player and anything else you tag, on top of the wind.
▸ Technical details
• Engine versions: UE 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8
• Modules: three editor modules (the lab, the one-click baker and the test suite) and one runtime module for falling leaves and interactive bending
• Platform: tested on the Windows editor. The runtime module and the baked assets are not restricted to a platform.
• Plugin dependencies: Niagara (stock Unreal Engine, enabled automatically)
• Content: the wind and foliage materials, an Epic-compatible Pivot Painter 2 material, wind and interaction parameter collections, and the falling-leaf effect with its leaf textures and material
• Documentation and support: eqlabs.studio
▸ FAQ
Do I need Houdini or Maya?
No. Everything happens inside Unreal.
Will it change my original mesh?
No. It always bakes into a copy.
Does it work with Epic's Pivot Painter shader?
Yes. The standard two-texture bake works with Epic's stock Pivot Painter 2 foliage shader.
Does anything ship in my game?
The baked meshes, textures and materials, and the small runtime module if you use falling leaves or interactive bending.
Are updates included?
Yes. Buy once, and future updates are included.
═══ FEATURE BULLETS (12) ═══
• One-click bake: right-click a Static Mesh and it sways correctly
• Mesh type detected automatically: tree, bush, grass, welded solid, hero piece or prop assembly
• Auto-Wizard: a guided five-step bake with a preview before you commit
• Full lab workbench: detection, element roles, manual paint, cut and merge, pivot picking
• Wood-first hierarchy so leaves are always at the tips
• Pivot Painter 1.0 and 2.0 bakes; the standard set works with Epic's stock foliage shader
• Non-destructive: always bakes into a copy of your mesh
• Wind material with gusts, bending, shelter, flutter and per-instance variation
• Scene-wide wind and four seasons from one parameter collection
• Textured falling leaves and interactive bending in your packaged game
• Impostor LOD, presets and batch baking
• UE 5.4 to 5.8