Animating a growing tree

BuCC

I know animation isn't what most of you do, but I'm going to ask anyway.

I have a project where I'm supposed to make a tree grow out of another object. So basicly a stem needs to come up, and from it roots, twigs, leaves etc.

Is there a good workflow for this? Any hints and tips? I work primarily in maya btw.

Mark Dygert

This script might be interesting: http://www.pxfactory.eu/scripts/grow/grow.html

This tutorial might help get things rolling: http://www.escalight.com/tutorials/3dsmax-tutorials/growing-tree.html

The digimation suite has a lightning plug-in that could work for roots: http://www.digimation.com/home/Downloads.aspx?sm=ds
Careful tho, it doesn't work with 2009 or 2010. But it will grow a crazy root like pattern pretty easily.

Also the Ivy generation scripts/stand alone apps might work well: http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=64271

Also Hristo Velev has a great set of tutorials that goes over using Rayfire and Thinking Particles (both plug-ins) to create cracks and spawn debris which could probably be turned into branches and leaves, I think at one point he even says that the behavior is pretty much the same.

You might be able to animate the branch tool in polyboost/graphite modeling tools?
You might want to look into tree makers like speedtree or treestorm and see if they have a grow animation.

Xoliul

I think Xfrog can do that automaticaly for you.

edit: okay not all automatic but the program is meant for this sort of thing:
http://www.xfrogdownloads.com/greenwebNew/support/FlowerBlossom.PDF

ivars

Is this for a rendering or game?
Closeup or far away?

Paint effects can be animated as they grow.

BuCC

Thanks for all the replies! Polycount is helpfull as always

Since I don't have much time for this project (3 days all in all), and don't feel comfortable working in max, i decided to apply the principle of the max script in Vigs link and actually do it manually in maya. That is; make a ton of clusters around a mesh and animate their scale from 0-1. It took me a little over an hour, but it works ;P

I would have gone with paint effects or xfrog but i wanted more control over the animation.

ivars - the project is prerendered and pretty close up.

Sorry for the late reply. It's a hectic time for me ATM.

ivars

Here might be another way to animate it. Using teo curves and extrude, but using only partial length and animating the max value of the subCurve.

In this example I've also animated the rotation on the extrude and the scale of the profile curve.

It's a bit twitchy because of the adaptive tesselation.

http://www.igorbazooka.com/3d/grow.avi