Animating trees and plants

[aaouviz]

Something I've failed at multiple times is animating trees/plants gently swaying in the wind.

I know this is possible, as I see it often in Corona (among others) rendered animations.

But I'm yet to find a suitable workflow or technique that gives a realistic result. Ideally, I'd take one of my existing 'still' trees from my Library and somehow animate the trunk swaying, the branches wiggling and the leaves fluttering. I know there are some good pre-made animated trees (but I haven't discovered these? Any tips?).

So, my question; what technique do you suggest for me to animate plants and trees in 3DsMax. I know there is probably different workflows for different needs, ie; background trees vs close-up of foreground trees moving in the wind.

Thanks!

[James Vella]

Growfx/Speed tree have good built in solutions for animated vegetation.

Otherwise you can do it the old school method and use a leaf selection/soft selection and animate it with a noise.

[aaouviz]

Thanks. I've had a quick look at GrowFx/SpeedTree. They seemed very good, but prohibitively expensive.

I know this is a google-able question, but do you know if I can import existing trees (from my collection) to then animate them?

[James Vella]

Yes, you can use the above method I mentioned for animating trees in your collection.

Growfx is quite cheap at $350, for what you get its a bargain in my opinion. Maxtree.org use it for all their libraries (and one of the best for plants IMO) so if you are buying their packs of trees you can get the bundle with growfx included for quick animations.

The way I look at it is, using 3dsmax to animate your trees is going to be painful and slow since you are working with a single cpu, animating high density geometry like this using modifiers etc will take so much of your time that by the end of your experiment you would have used more $$ in man hours than you could have if you just bought growfx and some maxtree packs, it also works with forestpro so you can combo these up for some great results. Just my 2c. Ive done it both ways, I ended up buying 4 licenses in total because of the value it gave our team.

[maru]

TyFlow is free, but it would probably require some learning and I don't think there are any assets made specially to work with it:

[ASaarnak]

Yes, you can use the above method I mentioned for animating trees in your collection.

Growfx is quite cheap at $350, for what you get its a bargain in my opinion. Maxtree.org use it for all their libraries (and one of the best for plants IMO) so if you are buying their packs of trees you can get the bundle with growfx included for quick animations.

Agreed GrowFX being a bargain. That´s what we have done in the past- buying Maxtree plants and animated them using GrowFX. Although it is a relatively simple process, it is still pretty timeconsuming.