I've been testing some ideas for moving objects to look as if they've been blown around in the wind. DandelO had shown that this was possible by animating a transform to move noise through a plant models geometry. Here I've started off with trying to get a tree to sway in the breeze, without the trunk base moving.
There's plenty still to do, like getting the branches to bob up and down, and getting the leaves to 'rattle' with the gust.
It's a shame that the models shadow doesn't seem to change with displacement. That said, if everything is moving, then this may not be too much of an issue. Btw, loving the GI cache.
C&C always welcome.
Cheers
Jon
Here's a lower rez version with some independent vertical movement.
Wow, not bad! That 2nd one in particular looks very good.
I suppose we should make WMV an allowed file type for attachments?
- Oshyan
@Hetzen
Great going! This is an important test I think! What you already have would work perfectly in a background, with a tiny bit of tweaking it will work great up close too. I think its just a matter of figuring out the amount of movement needed per model type, and have just the right amount of over all movement per animation. If you had, say, 15-20 species of plant models, and several populations, you would only need to have a few of them moving, tapering the timing across populations. And WOW! I think it could make a realistic animation really sing! WIND!
One thing I would really like to know is whats happing to the textures as the object is stretched and twisted. Do you have a few .jpg(s) frames of close ups on the model so we can see?
I hope you will be very generous with the info you are developing. I loved what dandelO did, but this is the missing part to his work.
Thanks for the good news!
@Oshyan
Hi,
I would like to be able to upload video here. I often post things that I really only want Terragen2 users to see. But have to put it up in public in order to share it. I guess I dont care if non-users see it, but non-users cant really understand the stuff we do here, and that can be a little annoying. Not sure how much I would use it, but it could be a nice option. At any rate, it would make downloading and saving videos from the community for my reference file, much much easer. Assuming others use the option that is.
You can upload videos now, including WMV, but the file size limit is still 5MB.
- Oshyan
Cool. Quick time has a save for web option just like photoshop. It is possible to compress even large files down to under 5 MB. So it is possible to share longer animations this way. not sure about the WMV thing though ;) But thank you for letting me know.
Looks good Hetzen!
Wow, that's really impressive. How did you do that? Did you use already animated objects? I can see that also the branches are swaying leaving out the trunks as you said.
Thanks guys.
It should work with any model bought into TG and work across a population in world space, ie, the animation should be unique to each instances position. This should mean I can design wind gusts. Those two trees are two instances of the same model at 90 degrees to each other, with the same noise seed in both. What can be seen is how the displacement travels between the two objects.
I've had to stop a 500 frame render of a forrest pan, so it'll be next week for an update.
Cheers
Looks great, Jon! Seems like you limited the wind by tree-height altitude. I did that with the open/closing curtains in my Red Room animation a while back, it was much easier than I imagined. I didn't relay it to my blowing trees files, though.
What's great is that this will bend over a population even if the populator has a scale range other than 1/1, as the model and wind noise are scaled together, I'm almost sure. You can 'roll' wind-waves with some stretched noise over a field of grass, and multiple other things, too! Shame about the shadows, if you make the scene's shadow areas also animated and moving somewhat, it's easy enough to disguise the static shadows to some degree. Unless they're directly looking for it, the viewer will likely never notice that the shadows aren't bending, especially in subtle breezes. :)
Keep going! I might dig out some wind files I haven't looked at for a while, or more likely, start afresh, since this world-space transform option is here now and I think my last efforts were a while before that.
Wow, I would like to learn how to do this :) great job!
Very nice, Hetzen.