Animating Plants and Trees
jaebea
Posts: 454
With a couple of object sequence importers floating around out there for DS, I decided to see what else they would work for. I exported an animated tree (gentle breeze) as object sequence and tried both scripts to bring the tree into DS. Both work equally well with the same results. Here is how it looks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTNtmUFUebM&feature=youtu.be
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Comments
Very nice! Any specifics please?
Yes nice and gentle
you could use the obj's as morph targets on the original too, I have done this with Carrara tree exports.
Maya does not natively export as object sequence. Someone wrote a script for it and it's available for free. I imported a tree from another program as fbx then exported as object sequence. I also played around with the paintfx trees in Maya, converting to polygons and exporting as object sequence. With those paintfx, one is only limited by what their imagination can dream up!
This is not keyed animation. It is object sequence to morphs, as Wendy was talking about above. Mcasual recently created a script to create the morphs. Also, Marcuswm did it a little differently a few years ago and we use it in combination with Marvelous Designer clothing. He has us bring in the sequence through the morph loader then provides the script to set all the morphs to 100. Both work equally well and provide the same results. The animation in the video was 100 frames and as you can see by the way the leaves move, it creates very realistic movement.
Thank you, jaebea!
What are the names of scripts?
I know this is an older thread (glad it got bumped), but has anyone had any luck importing the speedtree or any iclone dynamic animations (in any available iclone export format) into recent DS versions?
or... can carrara, poser, or blender be used (e.g. as an fbx to obj 'converter') such that we can accomplish this with current DS versions?
I'd also be curious which of mjcasual's (many) scripts are being mentioned here, if someone knows the (rough) name offhand.
tnx,
--ms
Mindsong, I did it 2 years ago. I will be trying again here shortly because I have a Weeping Willow to put into an animation I'm working on. Casuals script is "mcjObjsToMorphingProp" https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts2/mcjobjstomorphingprop ; Marcuswm's scrip is Animorph and can be found here: https://gist.github.com/marcuswilm/c2305cd494d54b9aba80bf5f43d0f7bf I am crossing my fingers that they still work!
The speedtree iClone trees are not up to my standards. In speedtree, you are offered two versions of each animation in the library. The low quality one is substandard and is what's used in iClone. The higher quality animation is what I used in the Youtube video at the top. Each leaf moves....very realistic! FYI, I did try to export one of the iClone trees and it wouldn't export. With speedtree, I had to export the FBX to Maya then, using a object sequence plugin, I was able to turn the fbx animation from the tree into objects. That's when you would bring the objects/morphs into DS using one of the 2 scripts mentioned above.
Carrara trees can simply be obj exported with morphs and skinning ticked along the timeline as morphloader targets for each other, you can combine them how you wish I usually do 3 a base obj and two morphs and puppeteer between them.
Great, thanks for digging up those tool-names and links for us. I have the mjcasual script (love his naming!), but didn't grock how powerful it is until this thread caught my eye. I could see a zillion uses for your technique (hair, water, dyn clothes, etc.). I must have picked up the script before I was ready to understand it!
Thanks also for the details on how you're using it and progressing with your tree motion migrations! Even if done with differing tools, your workflow steps are clear and enlightning. Good to know about the iclone speedtree issues before going too far down that road.
I keep hoping Daz will be able to find the time to tweak some of these import/export oddities so we can get rid of some of these 'conversion' steps folks around here are so clever at hacking together... Even a simple Daz BVH export of a t-posed character is broken to where it doesn't re-import correctly, and it seems to get worse from there.
I appreciate that most standards are interpreted differently in most apps, so it isn't just a Daz Thing...
As I poke at this stuff, I'll post anything meaningful I learn/hack back at you.
tnx,
--ms
I could totally see this being done for an anime-hair in the wind effect, where they prefer the semi-repeating loop animation effect. With puppeteer, I can see having the control over that repeat/variation level being pretty efficient/powerful.
In DS, I could see using a broad-stroke deformer on the branches of a tree for a couple of morphs for making a tree-in-a-storm bending effect in puppeteer. Can you do this in carrara (deformers)?
you got my gears going with that one... not enough hours in a day!
tnx!,
--ms
Have you guys looked into VWD's dynamics script for cloth and hair? IT is really amazing!
I use both the DS dynamics and am poking at VWD (very impressed with the results and videos I've seen). The native DS dynamics and stuff I've 'converted' work very well too. It took a bit of poking at it to figure out which lever does what, but the potential there is huge. The native DS optitex stuff 'just works', but figuring out the right cloth parameters is a time consuming and somewhat dark art. I'm digging into VWD a small bit at a time. The updated VWD docs are a godsend.
--ms