Wire Dynamics/l-systems

[Jeff]

i have created l-systems for trees and grasses that have leaves and such branching from the turtles. i have also adapted from examples, expressions for the angular and linear velocity in dops.

i can't however get the sims to work with the leaves. only the wires. it all disapears. do i need to add the leaves as rbd's seperatly? im really stuck and can't find a tutorial or example for this. any help would be greatly apreciated.

[michael]

sorry can't help with the DOPs at the moment...but could you attach the leaves after the sim?

[Jeff]

i can but am having trouble gettin them face proper, i was hoping to have a sim on the leaves as well, like they were rotating from the base of the leaf. i may be in over my head here.

sorry can't help with the DOPs at the moment...but could you attach the leaves after the sim?

28363[/snapback]

[tstex]

i can but am having trouble gettin them face proper, i was hoping to have a sim on the leaves as well, like they were rotating from the base of the leaf.  i may be in over my head here.

28366[/snapback]

With trees, I always find it useful to feed the L-system SOP leaf inputs a single point with an up vector and a normal. You can then use this point as a template for the copy sop after the tree has been calculated. This speeds up your L-system calculations a lot, and gives you more control after the L-system cook for arranging and animating your leaves as well.

On that note, I always use the leaf's unique point or id attribute to look up a unique channel of noise in CHOPs to get animation. To get decent leaf density on a tree you need a LOT of leaves. It's much faster to calculate CHOP noise than a dynamics simulation and CHOP noise gives perfectly good results. Use the noise channels to rotate the point normals on your leaf point slightly prior to copying the leaf geometry onto them. Possibly investigate instancing the leaves on too. You can have a control curve/chop channel called "wind" that multiplies the amplitude of the leaf animation throughout the animation.

Good Luck!!

Cheers

[Jeff]

With trees, I always find it useful to feed the L-system SOP leaf inputs a single point with an up vector and a normal. You can then use this point as a template for the copy sop after the tree has been calculated. This speeds up your L-system calculations a lot, and gives you more control after the L-system cook for arranging and animating your leaves as well.

On that note, I always use the leaf's unique point or id attribute to look up a unique channel of noise in CHOPs to get animation. To get decent leaf density on a tree you need a LOT of leaves. It's much faster to calculate CHOP noise than a dynamics simulation and CHOP noise gives perfectly good results. Use the noise channels to rotate the point normals on your leaf point slightly prior to copying the leaf geometry onto them. Possibly investigate instancing the leaves on too. You can have a control curve/chop channel called "wind" that multiplies the amplitude of the leaf animation throughout the animation.

Good Luck!!

Cheers

28373[/snapback]

thats a deadly idea, thanks a lot. i think you just saved me a ton of time.

[Andz]

With trees, I always find it useful to feed the L-system SOP leaf inputs a single point with an up vector and a normal. You can then use this point as a template for the copy sop after the tree has been calculated.

28373[/snapback]

Thank you for the tip!