How do I animate tree growing?

[tricky]

I'm familiar with Onyx and Treestorm, but these don't allow me to animate the growth of a tree. The ivy generator lets me grow ivy, but then animate the 'age' of it so that I can have the ivy growing over a surface.

I need to animate a tree growing from a sapling to a mature tree over about 20 frames or so. Do you know of any 'systems' that will allow this?

[stevesideas]

You can animate the growth of a tree over time using EXlevel GrowFX. Not sure how much control you want over it but it has an extensive set of parameters. Not sure it would be ideal for close-ups. You can also set it up to look like ivy too.

[super gnu]

growfx for sure. and imho you can get a lot closer to growfx trees than most other 3d types out there. maybe the growth wouldnt be totally convincing without a fair bit of work setting up relationships between various parameters (growfx is quite techy) but if its a 20 frame shot, it doesnt need to be totally accurate!

[simmsimaging]

GrowFX for sure has the ability. Contact Eduard for help and 3DMentor does some great trees with it and I think he does custom work too.....

/b

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

yup....the grow efex can be set to create really detailed geometry...bought a copy a week ago and so far i love it.
its very techy and requires a lot of hit and miss b4 you learn it....but if you go through the tuts on their site, youll get the picture and it will get you started quickly

[tricky]

Thanks everyone. Will give that a try. I'll see if they have a trial.

[Pictor2]

you could try this;

http://www.bionatics.com/EASYnat/

arguably a lot easier to use than growfx and with a bit of tweaking you can get some half decent models out of it. Seem to remember it being a bit buggy but there's a free demo so nothing to lose by giving it a spin...

[tricky]

you could try this;

http://www.bionatics.com/EASYnat/

arguably a lot easier to use than growfx and with a bit of tweaking you can get some half decent models out of it. Seem to remember it being a bit buggy but there's a free demo so nothing to lose by giving it a spin...

We 'invested' in Bionatics years ago and it was an utter nightmare - expensive too. Buggy as anything and at the time, machines couldn't handle the amount of geometry it created. I may try again at some point I guess.