Forest Pack > Forest Pro (*)

Transforms follow a spline?

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jonavark:
I have to make a number of intricate crop circle animations. I am curious, can you suggest a way to get plants to lay down in particular directions? For example, following a spline and lay down by connection of a transform axis to the spline direction?  I have been doing this by hand for some of the shots and I have a very complex one to animate now.

For example, if I have to have laid down wheat fill a bunch of text..

Thanks!

iToo:

There is two ways to modify the orientation of the items along specific directions:

- In Custom Edit mode, using the Creation Tools as Along a Path->Follow Path, or using other items as reference.
- In Generate mode, using a Rotation Map. Although in this case would be a bit tricky to get the right map:

http://www.itoosoft.com/forestpack/reference/reftransform.php

Recently, Jonny Allen made a presentation of this technique, used for one of his scenes, at AAUGA Boston. You can see the video here:

http://blog.konng.com/wp/2012/02/20/forest-pack-pro-presentation-at-aauga-boston/

jonavark:
Thank you. I will look into both of those. I had considered maps but I can't wrap my head around proper creation of them..

jonavark:
I think the vertex paint mode will work for me but I am a little confused about how to set it up and get my forest object to use the vertex paint values..

The video links were excellent but it didn't show how the paint was set up..

thanks again.

iToo:

In this case Jonny uses the Viewport Canvas to paint interactively the rotation map. Each color (from black to gray) defines a degree or rotation (from Min% to Max% in the range parameters). For example, if you paint using a gray color (128/128/128) and the rotation range is 0º / 359º, the items will be aligned with a rotation of 180º.

You also must take in account that each component RGB, defines one of the directions XYZ. So, to rotate in Z, it is necessary to convert the grayscale map to a blue range. This can be easily done using a Color Correction textmap, as shown in the screenshots of the documentation.

Basically, the rotation map is a map of normal vectors. All techniques about normal maps are applicable here.

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