Tree – Leaves Animation – Tips/Tricks?

[rob fisher]

Hi,

Tomorrow night I have to animate some leaves onto a tree. From baron to lush over the course of 5-10 secs. Slowly gradually, the director’s key word: organic.

I have a canopy and a tree trunk, it’s an orchard style tree, so round canopy, not a ton of branches. Right now I am just masking the leaves on in about 5 or 6 pieces or so. It’s kind of cheesey. I’ve worked a lot this week and last and the creative part of my brain is turning itself off so here I am.

Does any body have any (preferably quick) methods that I could steal/borrow/be ever thankful to hear about? Is there a tree animation spark I am overlooking :p

This is nothing new I’m sure, but I can’t even find a reference animation on the net, if you know of one link it here.

Thanks so much for any thoughts. Or just wish me luck if you’ve got nothing and I’ll be thankful for that too.

Thanks!
-rand.

[Anonymous]

Here you go:

1. If you want to create branches a flat option would be to use the Lightning spark in either Tinder or Sapphire. I am not at the box right now but you can create a static lightning and place the origin on the bottom of the screen. By turning off the jitter parameters you can create a nice looking tree and even animate it by adjusting size parameters. Then you can mask and rotate these branches and create a quasi-3d tree with flat branches. Or you can then displace them to give a better 3d look and shading.

2. If you have branches and just want to create leaves growing on them you can use particles. Step-by-step:
a. Create several leaf textures. Keep the root of the leaves right in the pixel-perfect center of the frame. You will have to create corresponding number of emitters if you want to have different textures. Create their alphas as well.
b. Using your previously created branches paint a generator map. This would be a black/white image, where white pixels will generate particles
c. In action place your generator image right over the branch image.
d. Add a particle generator, adjust the number of particles to something like 500 on the first frame and zero on the second frame. Speed should be zero. Size should be zero.
e. Add a leaf frame with its alpha in a media layer. Add it as a texture to your particle generator. And set it to Wrap. Set your particle draw modes to Square.
f. Go to the parent axis of the texture, make sure your y scale is 75% and x scale is 100%. This is to compensate for the square particle to look in the correct aspect. Adjust the center x and y to 360 and 288 respectively if you are in PAL. Half your resolution values wherever you are to be exact. This will ensure the leaves growing exactly from their roots when they are scaled up in the next step.
f. Add a particle animator and change its mode to function. In the function box enter :
size=smoothstep(0,50,frame)*200

This will make the particles grow from frame 0 to frame 50 to a size of 200.

We can introduce some randomness to their motion by adding this function to particle generator/parameters/spin_v in animation view:

noise3(frame/50)*.25

This will spin the particles on their origin smoothly.

Hope this helps. If you have questions please drop me a line at
info(at)sinanvural(dot)com

Sinan

[new way]

that sound amazing. I’ll give it ago. it’s an HD project, what you’ve written here seems like it could really be a gem.

thanks so much!

-rand

[Anonymous]

I also did some work on the size function to incorporate a more organic look. This function would use the lifetimeI parameter somehow, but my clients dropped in early.

Still drop me a line if you need some brainstorming.

Sinan

[new way]

I will be back in the suite in a couple of hours. I’ll post results if I have some success.

thanks again!
-rand

[David Stewart]

That is an awesome reply.

[Martin Furness]

If you get time it would be awesome to load a setup of this? LOL Great reply!

[Scott Balkcom]

Hey, great answer, just one question, you said there was a chance to have variated particles, like different textures, i’m doing something abit different a flower field, but i don’t know how can i have different textures…
could you get into that?,
thanks in advance 😀

[Anonymous]

The only way to have different textures would be to have different particle generators attached to different textures. There is also a color_variation parameter within particle generator but that would only change the color.

If you have a geometry of a simple flower that you are using as a node instead of square particle type then you can rotate your particles and playing around with color_variation and size parameters might give you what you want.

I am working on a series of in-depth particle tutorials. So if you have any questions about them please shoot.

Mail me:

info(at)sinanvural(dot)com

[new way]

practical use particle tutorials would be amazing.

so after giving this the old college try my time and patience were running out. I ended up using the keyer to erode the leaves into place, which worked really nicely. I’d love to see the result of the particle tests you’d been working on though if you have a setup, or even just a link to video.

I’ve posted a new question if you want to take a stab at that?

thanks again for responding so quickly to my original post.

-rand.

[David Stewart]

@rand_mcnally 28306 wrote:

practical use particle tutorials would be amazing.

+1

I’d love to see some if you have time 🙂

[Author]

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