Onyx Tree (with wind) solution for blossoms

[Timothy Back]

Hi all

I have been working with onyx tree for some time now and am happy with the results and the Treestorm plugin for wind animations. One thing I have never properly figured out though is how to do blossoming plants. I have to do some banksia trees and a whole heap of blossoming trees, all wind animated and I can't figure out a solution for this in my onyx-treestorm pipeline.

any ideas ??

[Justin Hunt]

The banksia blossom might be tricky, maybe model an individual blossom and link it to the tree so that it follows the trees animation???? possibly apply the Flex modifier to soften the sway of the blossom.

jhv

[Timothy Back]

I actually found a reasonable solution after a long night of trial and error. I modeled the blossom (banksia) and cloned it off a few times, then I used this script

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/sc...link-to-vertex

to link the blossoms to various vertexes. Unfortunately this is only a beta trial version of the script which is kind of buggy and only allows 3 simultaneous links. Once linked though I just made an animated proxy of the whole thing and it worked pretty well. I think this solution will work ok once this script if fully developed or if there is another link to vertex solution out there. I got around the 3 link minimum by attaching a bunch of flowers and then linking them to 1 vertex, just means that you only have 3 variations on the animation of the flowers but with all the leaf movement etc it would probably only look odd in an extreme close up.

A flex modifier would definitely help to soften the more delicate blossoms, will have to try that.