Physics & wind
One shared wind field that pushes on every dynamic bone in the scene, so a held pose still breathes.
The Physics panel holds one environmental force: Wind. It is a single field for the whole scene, not something you set per layer. What varies from bone to bone is how much each one reacts to it, which is set on the bone itself. Wind only ever moves a bone that has Dynamics turned on; see Bones & dynamics.
Opening the panel
Open it from Window ▸ Physics. It is off by default, laid out like the Layer Effects window: a card for the Wind field on the left, its parameters on the right. The parameters stay greyed out until you turn the field on.
Enabling wind
Click the enable pill on the Wind card. Until you do, every parameter below it is locked: there is no way to half-configure wind before it is switched on.
The four parameters
| Parameter | Default | Range | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strength | 0 | 0 to 300 | Overall force of the wind |
| Wind Direction | 0° | 0 to 360° | 0° blows toward the right, 90° blows down the screen |
| Turbulence | 30% | 0 to 100% | How much the gusts vary the wind's strength moment to moment |
| Gust Speed | 1.00 | 0 to 10 | How quickly those gusts rise and fall |
Under the hood the gusting is never fully random or fully periodic. Several independent cycles are blended together, and turbulence and gust speed control how much they vary the base strength and how fast that variation moves. Direction sways along with the gusts rather than staying perfectly fixed, so the wind reads as air rather than a metronome.
How a bone decides whether to react
Every bone with Dynamics enabled scales the shared wind by its own Wind Sensitivity, 0 to 200% and defaulting to 100%, found in that bone's Bone Dynamics section. A loose ribbon set to a high sensitivity catches the wind readily; a heavy prop at a low sensitivity barely moves in the same gust. A bone with Dynamics off is unaffected no matter how high its sensitivity is set, and a layer with no dynamic bone at all never reacts to wind regardless of what the Physics panel says.