Hello all,

I started to think about the best solution to achieve a realistic trees or plants/grass animation in softimage, and I decided, as I think it could be usefull for me and others, to start a topic dedicated to it.

So let's get started with the solution I'm using for now : mt_spring



For now, when I want to animate a tree for exemple, I create a spring with this addon, and I simply create an envelope rig for the tree.
The result is pretty good, but not ultra realistic as you can see in the first 15 seconds of my demo :

http://www.julien-chudik.com/demo.html

Better results can be found here (go directly around 2'00):


Or here :


Ok, but which method are they using ?

I found an other exemple which works great in lightwave :


What do you think about that ? What's your prefered method ?

I know, I think some of you'll tell me to go with ICE, but for now, I never put my hands on it, and I'm not used to python or other things like that...So I don't know where to start and I'm a bit afraid by the time investment it could require to me...

Julien

edited by gustavoeb: please use url, vim (for vimeo) and youtube tags thanks

So, nobody interested to discuss this topic ?

Hi Julius,

maybe its not a case of not wanting to discuss the subject, more of a case of too busy to discuss it did you do a search here for plants and trees? As far as I'm aware there is treegen which can do realistic trees with animations http://www.si-community.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=173&start=0&hilit=plants depends - do you want a generic system that can animate a whole lot of plants at once or individual trees? Of course it can be done with Softimage, its just there is always more than one way to accomplish a given task , some have more merits than others depending on how it fits with your workflow. you could go hand animated bones, random noise cage deformer or springs deformers. Ive used MTspring in the past and whilst its great for 1 or two hero trees its pretty clunky for more afterall MT spring was pre-ICE. If you wanted to take a look at ICE based system you could have a look at a tutorial I wrote to animate a field of deforming flowers. http://sites.google.com/site/tekanoice/tutorials/ice-flowers-part-i

Thanks Tekano,

With this topic, I wanted to discuss the different techniques for animating trees, flowers or grass. Not the creation process.

So it looks like strands seems to be best way to achieve an ultra realistic result. (forces like wind can be applied, and collisions could works too...perfect !)
I have to go with ICE ! I'm a bit afraid
I'll probably need help !

If anybody use any other method, I'm allways curious to discover and discuss it...

Thanks

well, an elegant way to animate tree, is to use the same procedural structure, already used for creation. ICE is just one way. IMHO once you have correct structure, so you're able to separate motion of trunk, each branch, leaves, some kind of procedural noise can do the trick. That is, creative application of ICE 'turbulence' node, without need to simulate anything. Afaik, a lot of 'wind forces on trees' in 3d apps, belongs to procedural motion, not to simulation.'Wind force' is just a nice name.
If you have just a dead mesh, in best case you can separate motion of leaves, living the rest to some noise motion. This can hold the water, sometimes, but I wouldn't call it ultra-realistic.

you can definately use T-Gen http://www.simartom.com

Also i remember Alex Roman explaining a bit of its technique used for animating trees and grass, and if i remember correctly he said he was using "cage" modifiers on branches and leaves. Trees was evermotion objects.

I might try ICE after T-gen personally, ICE requires lot of work i think.

goodluck


p.s. here you can find some tutorials, check out the "forces overview"

http://www.simartom.com/index.php?option=com_phocadownload&view=category&id=3:documentation&Itemid=6

some demo video with animations:

http://www.simartom.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1&Itemid=3

Thanks for replies

I'll give it a try. I'm making an architectural demo, and will post some results as soon as possible.