Help creating animated proxies/instances/bounding box in Blender?

Hi guys! I’m a Maya/zBrush user who is pretty new to Blender. I currently use the student PLE version of Maya which doesn’t allow for scripts and certain render settings so I wanted to try Blender for some of those things. I am trying to create an animated corn field with a wind effect created from a single custom corn stalk.

I was wondering if anyone knows of an equivalent of any of these techniques in Maya for creating the field exists in Blender that could be used to make this project?

  • Custom Paint Effects: Maya’s Paint Effects currently aren’t customizable so custom objects wouldn’t be supported. Does Blender offer custom paint effects?

  • Animated proxies: Maya can create proxies of an object and convert the original to a low poly bounding box which can be switched when rendering. All maps must be baked before attempting. Animation can be done by saving and replacing several proxy files one at a time. However, in order to automate creating several proxy files in Maya, a script of some kind generally has to be used (an example is miBox). Although with the PLE of Maya I can’t add the script making this method of using proxies unavailable.

  • Animated instancing with bounding boxes: All maps must be baked before attempting. I heard this method in Maya could work with the PLE edition but I was wondering if the option is also available in Blender and if so how it is done. Can instances that are replaced with bounding boxes be animated when rendered? In Maya there is an option called ‘Bake Animation’

If anyone has any ideas of how to animate a low res version of a object in Blender to save on computing power, I’d really appreciate the help! Thanks!

I currently use the student PLE version of Maya which doesn’t allow for scripts and certain render settings so I wanted to try Blender for some of those things
Maya PLE ended years ago. If you are a student you should be using the full Maya version from http://students.autodesk.com/?nd=download_center

Using the particle system you can paint objects as particles (your corn stalk)

I suggest you show us exactly what you have and someone may be able to give you a specific solution