The BRAWL² Tournament Challenge has been announced!
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
Animating a growing tree
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.
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.
Replies
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.
edit: okay not all automatic but the program is meant for this sort of thing:
http://www.xfrogdownloads.com/greenwebNew/support/FlowerBlossom.PDF
Closeup or far away?
Paint effects can be animated as they grow.
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.
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