Hi,
I am somewhat new to Blender, however I do have basic skills. I wanted to ask if there is anyone who can help me? I would like to take a jpeg image which I have imported (it is a picture of leaves from the top of trees,) and animate the leaves and branches as if they are blowing in the wind.
Hi;
In fact there’s two methods for animating an image;
I’ll just tell you about the easiest;
1- Create a plane;
2- Subdivide it about 64 splits;
3- unwrap it;
4- Now, you have just to animate the UV-Coordinates;
5- Render it.
The 2nd require some manipulation using GIMP to remove the leaves but keeping the background, then creating an alpha mask or just a masked image, now you have to images (the masked one and the background), then you have to do the steps above but only animate the masked image (not the background), that’s it.
Good luck! 
Make a textured plain.
Animate it using shapekeys.
As a side note, set your material to ‘shadeless’ so your animated image doesn’t end up with wrinkles and shadows from overlap.
stills I’ve animated with shape keys. although I had uniform vertex dispersion?spread? If I did that today I would follow the face topology of the person more accurate. it was more or less a test. wanna do this with live footage when the tracker hits svn.
but for now these are animated stills w/ shapekeys.
you can take it further and model the 3d environment from the 3d still, project the texture and move camera, I’ve done some stuf on it but haven’t uploaded to vimeo. but here’s someone else work.
by : Sander Wit
blender work.
Just to add to the ideas and options.
You wrote the you are somewhat new to Blender.
It helpful to know if you desired quality is hi, med, lo. Drama or Comedy. Quick results or 3 Month timeline.
Is original photo be the central focus via a texture?
You may consider all, some, or no options.
It appears you do NOT want to model everything from scratch.
For Branches the ideas from others previously are valuable … Shape Keys Vertex Hooks with image plane. Model, or find a reusable tree model, or delay that feature of moving branches.
But if you are experienced enough … you may get simple interesting results with the following.
-1. These ideas are focused on free flowing leafs.
0. Gimp can be used to created PNG images with transparency.
If the image has a visual foreground and background … create a foreground PNG with transparency which can be used in Blender.
Create and Isolate Leafs from original photo in 2D using PNG with transparency from the original photograph.
Create Leafs in 3D View window. UV Map Materials/Textures photo colors to the model for a little color consistency. Thoses Textures come from Step 2.
Use a particle system to generate many more leaves that you created in Step 2 and 3. These leaves are free flowing (gravity and wind) and not attached to tree. Particle systems are intended for mass copying and movement animation of items.
Combine original photograph with particles leaves in front. Place foreground image to suit your vision.
Some of these ideas may need to be researched here BA, or at places that have free video tutorials. Documentation is of various qualities. I might use a web search such as
Blender 3D 2.5 2.6 Particle Systems Tutorial
Good Luck … I am almost out of the beginner level 1 phase for Blender.
Blender can easily be a challenge.
Hi, in the video above can you explain how you wrap a flat 2D image around the 3D model. I understand how to unwrap, but what I don’t understand is do you somehow “project” the 2D image onto the 2D model or some other method because I can’t figure how you wrap the flat building image around a 3D object?
I also in the video above at (16:00 - 18:00) I don’t understand how they modeled some of the objects like the figure with the umbrella and the posts? If they uses a “plane” object did they model all the details or did they use some other method?
Thanks spyres for the link. I 'll take a look. 