Low level plants and shrubs - flex for wind animation?

[Morne]

Hi all

Using no plugins, how would you go about adding wind to low level plants like a fern for example? Is flex the only way? Is there some other modifier I could use or maybe a free plugin?

[joconnell]

Flex, soft selections on the leaf extremities and noise, ugly bends.

[Morne]

...noise, ugly bends.

I'm not sure what you mean by those 2 things. Could you elaborate a little please?

[joconnell]

Yes! What we used to do some times was get a plant mesh, stick on a mesh select modifier and in vertex mode select only the tips of each leaf or branch. We'd then tweak the soft selection distance so that it gradually ran back to the roof of the leaf or branch and then we'd put an animated noise modifier on top - it wasn't accurate by animate but gave a soft rustle to the trees, and it was good enough in a lot of cases.

[Morne]

And then you still had flex in there somewhere or is the flex and wind solution different to the animated noise modifier?

[Seraph135]

I've used flex and wind to animate a bunch of small plants before. I created several very long point caches (This was before the days of animated vray proxies) with the plant rotated differently each time. Then I scattered these across the ground and randomized the start time of the point cache so you wouldn't see any moving exactly the same.

Tim J

[joconnell]

And then you still had flex in there somewhere or is the flex and wind solution different to the animated noise modifier?

Not even! It was just general rustling of leaves on trees so a bit of movement was fine - it was pretty light on viewports too.

[sandykoufax]

Like this?
http://www.ramyhanna.com/2011/09/blow-trees-blow.html

[Morne]

Not even! It was just general rustling of leaves on trees so a bit of movement was fine - it was pretty light on viewports too.

Thanks this works very well... it takes some tweaking to get the timing right but I'm happy so far