Plant Growth?

[JesseJ]

I posted this in the wrong section, maybe you guys can help...

I need to animate a plant growing from a seed to a full fruiting plant. I have been able to manipulate a paint effects mesh to look like the specific plant I need. (tomato) I have messed with some of the attributes of that mesh to try to simulate "growth" but it doesn't look like it should. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to animate this? Any ideas or thought would be helpfull. Thank you.

[laxman]

can you do that scene in cut scenes? For example, have the camera cut from place to place. If you can, then I would suggest modeling the initial growth with polygons or nurbs, and make sure it looks like the paintfx plant you made. So have the grwth start initially, then cut a few times, then render out as much 'growth' as you can with the paintfx. At some point replace the plant you modeled with the paintfx, plant. The growth you can probably model with extrusions, then animate the construction history for the start and end point of the extrude. There is a video on doing that here at DT.

[LaLiLuLeLo]

I think it can be done with PFX attributes themselves...one of my friends was able to do it

[Edward Norton]

Here goes. I was trying to create the same animation but with vines and this is how I came to create this effect for myself. After creating the Stroke and having the plant look the way you want go into the attributes editor and go to the stoke attributes. There is a tab called "Flow Animation" this controls the growth of your plant from its base branches, to its twigs, leaves, and buds etc. After you get the timing you want (which by the way is a little tricky) select your Stroke and go to "Modify" convert "Paint FX to Ploygons" (some older versions might not do this) as far as the tomato goes I would create this out of nurbs or polys and make a blendshape out of it and then keyframe its scale and blendshape deformation to achieve the look you want. Good luck.

Re post if you need something explained further.