Tree growth animation WIP

[williamgaylord]

This is somewhat of a trial and error process. I'm not happy with the density of branches near the trunk. I'm going to reduce the number of main branches and add more of the short secondary branches. This should give me a much better looking tree form.

 

I'm also not happy with the uniformity of the arrangement. Doesn't have the aesthetic appeal I want. I'm going to arrange the branches less uniformly to give it a more natural look. More of a bunching of branches and leaves here and there, with some more space between "bunches".

 

One reason this project is taking so long is the number of "rehearsals" it's taking to optimize the look vs. performance. The number of things to tweak each time is pretty huge. Definitely not an efficient workflow sort of thing at this point. That would take a software utility to build it for you, with some nice features to allow you to tweak it efficiently.

 

I think I'm really pushing AM's limits in terms of the sheer number of constraints and relationships involved. Some of the branches are loosing their texturing during the camera rendering. And this is only one tree... May have to send another sample to Hash to figure out what's happening and fix it.

 

Bill Gaylord

[williamgaylord]

Just a quick test of one of the newer branch rigs in version 11.1. Seems to behave itself. May resume work on this project this weekend. This is animated such that the leaf growth is staggered...a bit more interesting.

 

Branch test in AM V11.1 *Warning* Will download and play automatically. To download without playing automatically, right click and select "Save Target As".

 

Bill Gaylord

[Paul Forwood]

Mmmm!

 

Where has this thread been hiding for so long?

 

Excellent all round, William!!!

[Dhar]

Whoa! That was great.

[bentothemax]

WOW, that looks really really good so far! keep it up, if theres anything i can do to help ill do it . . . or i should say, i will try to do it

 

*eager for more*

 

Ben

[Rodney]

Bump... because there is some really cool stuff going on in this WIP.

Characters, Buildings, Trees... great stuff!

[williamgaylord]

Think I might get hopping on this project again. Haven't tried the project in 12.0 yet so it will be an interesting experiment.

 

I would like to explore ways to avoid having to render up to 9 of these trees and I might also try out using hair for foliage, now that most or perhaps all the technical problems I encountered earlier may have been solved.

 

I have yet to experiment with AM's layering capability. It might be a big help in this project. I may have up to 9 trees in the scene, which would be a huge rendering load. If I could separately animate and render a single tree, rotating it each time so it looks like different tree, and composite the renderings into the full scene, that would be fantastic. Is this sort of thing possible? Is there a tutorial on this sort of thing out there somewhere?

 

Thanks!

Bill Gaylord

[williamgaylord]

Here is an example of a hair based leaf cluster I developed. It basically uses three invisible overlapping dome shapes and hair for the leaves.

 

The recipe is here: Leaf Cluster Recipe

 

The project file can be found here: Project File

 

Here is an sizeable collection of leaf images I supplied to the TWO movie project: Leaf Collection

 

I am rendering a fly-by past the leaf cluster that I'll post later.

 

Bill Gaylord

[williamgaylord]

Here is the fly-by animation (beware--about 2MBs): Fly-By

 

(Ooo...It occurs to me now that a fly-through might look very interesting! A bug's perspective!)

 

Next I'll likely revisit animating hair based leaves growing. The last time I tried it there was too much "popping", but I've been told this might easily be overcome by tweaking a parameter or two.

 

Bill G

[Simon Edmondson]

>> want to put it in the context of a vacant lot in the middle of a city-scape. Any recommendations or how-tos for that sort of thing would be greatly appreciated.

 

Bill

 

I've just got to thethread following your directions, might I make a humble suggestion?

 

If you set you tree growth in the context of the real time it would take, you have a wonderful foil to use for an implied "time lapse" animation to contrast with the tree and the man made location around it ? I think the oldest tree in the UK is thought to be nearly a 500 years old ( I may have that wrong ? ). The developments that have gone on around it in that time are quite astonishing. The pace of development in US cities is even faster of course !

 

I'll go to sleep now...

Simon

[williamgaylord]

It occurs to me that I might be able to use composited renderings to get around the computational load of rendering the whole tree animation, along the lines of the techniques thread below:

 

Compositing Particles

 

I could even use the same branch or two, just relocate it and render it in different location of the tree! That might allow me to render the animation from a wide angle view relatively close to the tree.

 

Worth a try! Just need to squeeze in some time to try it out...

 

 

Bill Gaylord

 

Update: The most obvious flaw to this is how the branches and leaves in each layer of rendering cast and receive shadows among themselves. Not sure how to overcome this drawback.