Okay so what I’m looking to do here is have, as the title says, the ultimate tree shader. I’m relatively new to this, but I am fairly competent when it comes to scripting / programming.

What I want the shader to do: Be affected by the sun and dynamic lights, have normal bump with specular, move verts like in the animTree.fx, and have shadow map support so I can bake occlusion.

So the tree would have 2 sets of UVs, one for color and one for shadow. It would have 3 textures, one with color in RGB and transparency in alpha, one with normal map in RGB and specular map map in alpha, and one with a shadow map.

Shadow is the most important, because baked occlusion (on trees modeled correctly) would look great. I modeled the tree below to demonstrate the affect of just occlusion (the tree isn't done yet, but you get the picture). It’s not common for a tree to be upside down, so the lighting should almost always look good.



The reason I’m posting is to see if this is possible. An expert may be out there thinking: “You can’t mix X with Y!” So I figured before I started diving in I’d ask to see what people think.