Version 1.0.0. For a five-minute first bake, start with the Quick Start. For material properties, see the Shader Reference. For fixes, see Troubleshooting.
Note for publishing: blocks marked 📷 are screenshot placeholders. Each one states exactly what to capture and why it earns its place. Replace the whole block with the image when publishing to Notion. A consolidated capture list is in
Screenshot_Capture_List.md.
Five ideas explain everything else.
Element. A part of the mesh that moves as one piece — a branch, a leaf card, a clump. Every element owns a set of source triangles by triangle index, so ownership stays stable even when elements share vertex positions.
Hierarchy. Which element hangs from which. One element is the root (usually the trunk); everything else has a parent. Children inherit their parents’ motion before adding their own — that inheritance is what makes a tree read as a tree rather than a flag.
Pivot, axis, extent. Per element: the point it rotates about, the direction it points, and how far it reaches. Extent is a real distance in metres — the physical swing arm — so a long branch swings further than a short one.
Hierarchy level vs wind bucket. These are two different things and confusing them causes most tuning frustration:
Level 1–4 in the
material actually reads.They are usually aligned but independent. You can have a structurally deep element that should still flutter like a leaf, and the wind bucket is how you say so. Painting a bucket by hand sets an override that survives re-detection.
The bake. Solving writes the answer into a mesh (with lookup UVs) plus two data textures. The shader reads them per vertex and replays the cascade on the GPU. Nothing animates on the CPU.
📷 DOC-01 — Concepts diagram A simple annotated diagram (not a screenshot): one tree silhouette with a trunk, two branches and leaf clusters, labelled element, parent link, pivot, forward axis, extent. Colour the four hierarchy tiers to match the Hierarchy debug view so readers connect the diagram to what they will see on screen. Why: this is the one page where a reader either grasps the model or spends the rest of the manual confused. A diagram does it faster than three paragraphs.