mtpeak2

Looks real good. The fog could be toned down alittle though. For a spooky forest it seems abit bright. I,ve always wanted to do a scene like that. Keep up the good work.

Is this the look your looking for? Done with a pose slider on the hair guides. You could pull the hair guides to one side of the globe and have a bone for the center ball pointing in that direction and use an aim at constraint on a hand to have it follow.

Thanks johnl, but I don't think I qualify as an expert. I'm sure there are alot of people on the list that could do better than me.

Here's an update with new sliders. Still need to add leaves to stem and underside of flower. I need to talk with Bill Gaylord about the growth slider for the flower. I'd like to know how he got it to grow along a path.

Try setting the force type to vortex, fan doesn't seem to do anything. Make sure dynamics are on also. Instead of a force, you could create a pose percentage and move the hair guides to different locations between 0% and 100% to get movement.

You can adjust the slider whereever you like. I left it wide open depending on the flower type. Flowers don't all open the same.

I've been working on a toon flower model for the trees with leaves project. I discovered something interesting. You can control hair guides with a pose slider. The model is set up for toon render, but I think I'll be able to set an image for the petals for normal renders. I'll be adding sliders for color, size of petals and for flower growth. Let me know what you think.

http://johnl.inform.net/pages/treeswithleaves.htm You can download from this link.

Well with the great plug-in that Marcel made I thought I'd try to make it even easier to build trees for background props. And why keep it for myself. I just would like to see what other people can do with it.

A link to the project is on the Animation:Master forum. Trees with leaves thread.

I got the zip file down to 3.4 megs and I am working with someone to try to bring it on-line.

Cool. That would make a great screensaver.

22 megs zipped through XP. Don't know if zipping through winzip would be any better.

Hi, looks good but the shotglass looks a little thick at the rim. Maybe move the hat a little to the left too.

I'm not much of a critic, but you have two five point patches next to the ear. The one closest to the ear you could end the one spline in a hook.

The treeswithleavs project is ready, but it's too big to post here. Any suggestions on where I can post it? That is if anybody is interested. It has 26 images, 5 materials, 6 models and three actions. Added a few sliders to the models. And added the material right to a tree target model to use with the treez plug-in to save a few steps.

I did notice something strange today. The color of the model was rendering wrong (defaulting to original color). But I saved the project and reopened it and it rendered fine. The layers for the bigger forest worked well.

Well thanks to you I now know I can add animation to the hair image. Now if I render that with an alpha channel, I could add it to a chor as a layer and build a bigger forest. I'll have to try it out. By the way, how is the tree cloth going?

Hi John Tried your idea with my leaves project. Animated a couple of trees.

Here's my first attempt at adding tree movement with a slider.

Try hitting the spacebar or view/refresh on toolbar to refresh the hair material on that frame to bring it to where it is supposed to be before rendering. Hair is a little slow in refreshing itself in realtime.

He looks great, but I have one suggestion. He needs claws.

Here is a dynamics test with the toonleaves model.

Ran into problems with the new 11.0b update, but I think I'll be able to work them out. So in the meantime here is the toonleavs model to test out. I would like to see some of the results of your tests please. It will keep me motivated to keep working on the project. The bushes are the default model, just scaled and slider changes. The trees are imported into the model and the material dragged into your group, just like the other model was. Deleting and renaming still apply. This is designed to not use a leaf image.

Heres a pic of the toonleavs applied to trees. The bushes are just the base model that hold the sliders.