Summary:

Ambient motion is vital in making particular objects feel alive, such as foliage and fabric. It is beneficial in breaking up the monotony in a scene, especially in cases with copious object reuse.

I added a shader variant for wind-like vertex animation to optionally provide that feature for artists. The wind has two octaves of gradient noise and can be masked by vertex color to control macro and micro wind influences. I used each object’s world position to offset the wind, distribute the animation, and establish spatial coherence.

With some tuning and creativity, turbulence can easily be added to volumes such as air and water, as demonstrated in the samples above.