The wind within the 3ds Max plugin behaves as it was defined in Cinema. Strength and direction are variable within Max.

Wind works with Max's Wind Space Warp object, both directional and spherical. The default strength value of 1.0 results in a strong wind. The useful range for SpeedTree is between 0.0 and about 3.0.

Multiple wind space warps attached to a single SpeedTree object will result in an aggregate wind effect.

By default, the wind system begins with a strength of zero and ramps up to the set strength. By using a pre-roll of around 10 seconds, the wind system is put into a steady-state, bypassing the ramp up so that the wind will be blowing at or near the desired strength by the first frame. If a start-up animation is desired, set this value to 0.0.

The wind object has several attributes that can help optimize workflow when the wind computation load gets too high:

• Suspend Updates: If there are 50 unique 5M-tri trees in a scene tied to a wind source and you drop the wind strength from 75% to 50%, it could take two minutes or longer for them to update. If you enable Suspend Updates, the wind computation will be bypassed until it is re-enabled.

• Use Fast Noise: This is the same as the production/draft noise toggle in the Modeler. It can reduce wind computation by 30-50%.