Release Notes

All notable changes to Wind Studio, newest first. What comes next is on the Roadmap.

v1.2.1 · First release

Unreal Engine 5.7 · Win64

Studio

One editor tab for the whole job, in six steps: Parts, Bones, Wind, Interaction, Build, Docs.
Rig in Wind Studio from any Static Mesh in the Content Browser; Edit in Wind Studio reopens a built mesh with its full rig.
Save & Share Rigs: one file holds parts, bones, painted weights and wind settings. Send it to a coworker or keep it in version control.
Autosave after every edit, Load Latest after a crash, full undo / redo.

Mesh prep and parts

Fix the pivot (gizmo or snap to base, top, centre, selection or bone) and bake a new scale into all LODs, Nanite, sockets and collision.
Select by island, material, polygroup, triangle, smooth region or brush, or split the whole mesh automatically.
Part roles: Rigid, Core, Mid, Outer. Bone-less leaves can follow a branch part.
Every part gets its own colour.

Bones and weights

Auto Bones grows chains through trunks, branches, blades and cloth (Adaptive, Chains or Branching), with a 20 cm default spacing.
Hand tools: place, move, re-parent, weld, straighten, insert, delete.
Grass clumps: a few chains drive thousands of blades, each with its own small variation.
Paint skin weight or stillness (Pin); wind weights from a stiff base to free tips.
Open rigged meshes from Houdini, Epic's PVE or Blender with their bones and skin weights.

Three runtime tiers

GPU: Nanite Skeletal Meshes animated by Epic's Dynamic Wind, the cheapest way to fill a forest.
Pivot Paint: Static Meshes in Epic's Pivot Painter 2 format, animated in the material; works with foliage painting and instancing.
CPU Physics: a bone chain solver for hero assets, cloth and cables, running on worker threads.
Banners and flags as one connected sheet, with fabric presets from silk to a wet towel; cables pinned at both ends.

Interaction and level

Characters push plants aside or are blocked by them; small stems bend, big trunks barely move.
A test character walks through the asset in the preview.
One Wind Manager drives every tier together, with weather presets from calm air to a mountain gale.

Build and pipeline

One-click build with Skeleton and Physics Asset; rebuilding updates every placed copy.
Optimization for CPU Physics: fewer bones, fewer bones per vertex, no physics asset, slower updates far from the camera.
Export to Epic's Dynamic Wind format and USD for Nanite Assembly and Houdini pipelines.

Viewport and help

Lit, Parts, Clay, Weights and Wind views with smooth shading.
Keyboard shortcuts in the style of Maya, 3ds Max, Blender and Houdini that never clash with Unreal's camera controls.
Hold Ctrl+Alt for extended tooltips, press F1 to open the docs for any control.

New name: Wind Studio (previously announced as Dynamic Wind Studio).
Interface: graphite panels with one green accent, clearer selected buttons, Studio-styled menus, Type as a dropdown.
Paint Weights: left-click or R switches to the tool; right-click opens the Skin Weights window.
Mesh parts list: two lines per part so the name stays visible on a narrow panel; the list fills the panel and scrolls inside itself.

GPU tier: no character push and no local wind yet, because Epic's Dynamic Wind does not support them.
CPU Physics: very slow, heavy trunks are limited to about 0.56 Flexibility.
Windows (Win64) only.