Growfx animated growth and Vrayfur problems

[stevesideas]

I am animating a small plant growing from a very small bud using growFX. The main stem and small branches have very small hairs on them so I have applied a Vrayfur object to the plant which is only applied to material id 2 (the main stem and branches). The problem is that the vray fur doesn't seem to sit still. It just jumps around everywhere. Also there is flickering during the animation.

How do I grow the hairs as the main stem grows and have the hairs sit still during the rest of the growth ?

[joconnell]

I could be wrong but I think growfx dynamically updates the geometry of the stems of your plants as they grow - almost like the adaptive option of a spline, so if it's getting bigger as it goes, new faces are being added at intervals which vray is having to resample each time. I found that I had to up the amount of path steps / knots or some equivalent term in the grow fx bits to make the path really accurate so that sub branches or other objects that I had locked to the mesh wouldn't jump around a lot.

If it's something kind of simple, you might be better off taking some splines out of grow FX and then using these as a source for a path deformed cylinder - you can animate the radius of the cylinder and the stretch amount on the path deform for a similar growing effect, and it'll keep the face count and assignment consistent for vray hair to stick to.

[stevesideas]

I'll have to check what options growfx has in terms of producing the geometry but yes I think your solution may work if growfx can't do it. Other than that I was going to do the hairs in growfx directly but because the radius changes for the growth, the hairs will not sit on the surface. Very annoying !