Animating a tree in max

Will Faucher

Hey,
I was wondering how one would proceed to animate a tree along with the leaves (blowing in wind) in a realistic manner. I'm pretty sure I'd be using flex and a wind space warp, right? If not, what tools/plugins (preferably free) are available to help me out? I don't want to have to animate leaf by leaf...

Lamont

Prophecies wrote: »

I don't want to have to animate leaf by leaf...

Sorry to say, but that's how it's usually done. Each leaf must be keyframed.

Other than that, I guess the best way would be to use weighting to dictate what parts are stiffer than others. It's been a long time since I used 3DS Max, but I used weights and bones. Then a few animation curves for swaying in the wind/gentle breeze, and I made a script to increase/decrease wind intensity/branch "stiffness".

I am sure Max has gotten better over the years, so there must be better ways.

ZacD

Is it for a game or animation?

Will Faucher

It's for my demoreel actually. But yeah, it is game-oriented. However I wish to make it as realistic as possible, and if I need to keyframe each leaf... this might take a while.

Lamont

Just use bones if it`s for in-game. And no, I hope you were joking about animating each leaf. If you had actually did it, that`s hardcore.

You CAN bring in morph info into UnrealED, so using advanced tools in Max would work if you save out the morphs.

bbob

A good and easy solution would be using Vue7, if its not necessary to do it realtime.

But I guess I would do it by having a main bone chain running up the trunk, and a few running out the branches. Then if you have more trees, spend some time setting up a rig so all you have to do is move a dummy around for the sway direction. Cant really tell you how to go about making such a rig from the top of my head at this moment, but I think it would entail a spline solver, with the outermost verts linked to the dummy.

Also, depending on how high or low poly it is, then put a slight noise modifier on the leaves, for that sweet fluttering action. Perhaps have a particle emitter or two in the middle, spawning leaves flying off.

rasmus

It wouldn't be the end of the world to animate one leaf, clone it and then just offset the time - depending on how you're gonna use it, ofcourse. With the out-of-range-function this might work if you have a bunch of them all offset, all over the place, or maybe do the same for a whole bunch of leaves on a branch, etc. See how far you get with minimal work. Some kind of world-space noise to simulate wind would be good too, or through animated UVs maybe.

Mark Dygert

I think SpeedTree has dynamics or some other tree generator does? Whatever it was it rigs it with bones and also applies wind and key frames.

That might be a good option if you haven't already modeled out a tree. If you have, you might be able to closely recreate it?

Or maybe I was dreaming...

Will Faucher

Oh phew, I was really thinking I would have to animate each leaf. Thank god. Many of your suggestions help alot. Thanks so much. I will look into speedtree, since that is what I was thinking of using when you guys told me to animate each leaf :P. I'll look into some plugins/scripts, maybe those can help to. Also, I have not modelled the trees yet, so it's all good. I'm planning in advance.

Thanks again!

r4ptur3

there's new spring based animation features in the UDK -- i have not had time to mess with it yet but I am sure you could put them to good use.

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/InteractiveFoliageActor.html

Rhinokey

i've seen a lot of times just a slight aimation for the uvs of the leaves (i asume your leaves are a poly plane with many leaves on it? just animate the uvs of one poly chunk so the leaf cluster gently moves back and forth, then clone it around

so the geo does not move at all, but the texture of the leaves shuffle a bit

Eric Chadwick

Farcry did this, it looked OK. Crysis does a better job with its vertex shader. It's the same idea as the world-space noise rasmus mentioned.

I did a bones-based approach for this palm tree, but frankly that's more work than it's worth, unless you're limited to bones only. You would be better served by using a vertex shader, like Crysis does. I bet UE3 supports this.

Oops, forgot you're doing it in Max. Noise spacewarp, with a Poly Select modifier to limit it to the tips of the leaf-planes, would probably be the best bet. See the palm tree idea, except no IK.