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Simon Edwards replies
Adding movement to the leaves of a tree in a scene can bring some life back into a static sequence.
Tree building programmes such as ONYXGARDEN provide animation opportunities by creating multiple morph targets with its Tree Storm plugin. This can be extremely memory heavy in a scene, is time consuming when generating morph targets and can also dramatically prolong rendering during the pre-load.
At other times, you may have simply downloaded your own tree object from an online source with no animated attributes attached to it.
A fast and economic method to create movement is to work on a single tree object, with no morph targets, but with an animated noise modifier attached. The leaf movement will be less physically accurate (with wind directions and so forth) but if only a suggestion of movement is required, then this technique is likely to be perfectly adequate.
I prefer to isolate the ‘leaf’ polygons from the rest of the tree object such that
they alone inherit any movement. If the branches and trunks are included as well, the resulting deformation can end up looking quite unnatural.
I will break the methodology down into four simple steps for this tutorial with the assumption that you already have an Editable Poly tree model imported into your scene.
The results of this technique can be viewed in a short marketing animation created for Altin Homes at this link: vimeo.com/156956206.