Cycle: Architectural Animation
Video: Gork Studio
First, let’s list the ways to bring vegetation to life:
1 Using Ready Libraries (e.g., Evermotion or Forest Pack) Pros:
2 "Growing" Trees Using GrowFX Pros:
3 Animating Vegetation Manually Using Modifiers Pros:
After weighing all factors, we chose the third option.
To prevent potential mistakes, here are some additional points:
PS Before a commercial task, I highly recommend practicing with various animation options to understand the time you will need for implementation.
Video: Gork Studio
First, let’s list the ways to bring vegetation to life:
1 Using Ready Libraries (e.g., Evermotion or Forest Pack) Pros:
- Quick;
- Good animated grass setups in the forest;
- Animation previews available; Cons:
- Limited variety (you won’t find any "bubble fruits" or "blood-suckers" there);
- The materials in such collections usually leave much to be desired;
2 "Growing" Trees Using GrowFX Pros:
- Can create any tree;
- Better control and quality of animation over individual plant objects (trunk, branches, leaves);
- Animation previews available; Cons:
- Time-consuming;
- And again, time-consuming;
3 Animating Vegetation Manually Using Modifiers Pros:
- A golden mean in terms of implementation time;
- Predictable quality of geometry and materials;
- The technique is suitable for almost any geometry;
- Acceptable level of animation control, including for close-ups; Cons:
- Difficult to preview on heavy geometry;
- Requires practice working with animation curves;
- Heavy files;
After weighing all factors, we chose the third option.
To prevent potential mistakes, here are some additional points:
- If you have dynamic flythroughs, the animation needs to be intensified 2−3 times compared to a static camera. Keep this in mind when planning deadlines. Setting up vegetation animation is labor-intensive and requires a lot of attention;
- For long flythroughs, it makes sense to loop tree animations (i.e., the end and start points on the graph should match — always check this);
- The cycle duration should be no less than 100, preferably 250 frames (at 25 frames per second);
- To avoid the effect of tiling animation, start the cycle at different positions on the X-axis for different trees;
- Three main modifiers for vegetation animation — Bend (for the trunk), Noise (for branches and leaves), FFD (general). Polygons are selected using Soft select;
- Geometry with an open stack of modifiers critically affects the fps in the viewport, so if you have a heavy scene, you can bake the animation using the Point Cash modifier (a file similar to a proxy is created on the disk, only with animation in the ".pc2" format);
- Point cash can be thrown onto both geometry and proxies, and can be recorded in proxies (the main thing is that the geometry remains the same);
PS Before a commercial task, I highly recommend practicing with various animation options to understand the time you will need for implementation.