I am a very new user of Blender, and have really being doing well with blender 2.5, but I cannot seem to figure out how to make a tree imported from Arbaro, interact with my wind forcefield. I have my video on youtube with current progress, but it looks awkward when grass is blowing but a weeping willow is rigid as stone.
My thoughts would be to turn the leaves and stems into cloth objects that have a really high rigidity but that only seems to make them disappear completely.
Learning to animate is a part of my Digital Media Project class, and any help is greatly appreciated.
The problem with Arbaro models is that all branches, leaves etc. are created as single meshes - that is all the leaves, for example are one object. It might be possible to fake leaf movement by using a displacement modifier. I haven’t tried that yet. What I have done is to radically reconstruct the model. I’ve kept the trunk as is but deleted all the leaves and all the branches but one. I’ve then added a cloth modifier to that branch and duplicated it manually around the trunk. Don’t forget to pin the root of each branch. I tried to simplify this process by using particle instancing but so far without success…
I’ve then added leaves to the branches with hair particles. Here’s a test:
It’s not perfect, but it’s a start. Hope this helps.