Hi all,
I’m creating a mangrove scene in Blender with a boardwalk and some morning fog. See following image (btw: still relatively new to Blender, what do you think?).
I’m trying to get some more realism into this scene by generating wind and some movement of the mangrove trees and leaves.
The mangrove trees are generated by a particle system applied to the ground that spawns the trees.
The trees itself are a collection containing parts of the trees: stem, roots, branches. The leaves are applied on the tree by applying a Particle Instance Modifier onto the leaves themselves, using the particle system on the branches which generates empty objects. This spawns the leaves on the branches, but also keeps the leaves when we apply the particle system on the ground that spawns all trees in the scene (neccessary for a particle system in a particle system).
Now, in order to generate wind, I deform the tree using the Simple Deform modifier that bends the tree geometry. It deforms the angle with a noise modifier. I apply the same to the leaves, but with a higher frequency and different scale. This creates a really well animated tree.
However, after applying, when this is spread over all trees spawned by the particle system on the ground, all trees of course move exactly the same way… This makes total sense of course, but is not what I’m looking for.
Hence, I’m wondering whether it’s possible to generate a random seed (phase) number for each particle (so for each tree). This would randomize all tree movements, which would make it amazing to look at.
I figured it would be possible using the animation nodes plugin. This contains a particle information node that can get the location of the particle, which then would be the input for the seed number (this seems to make sense to generate a random seed number). However, I have no idea how to change the angle of the simple deform modifier.
Would this be a decent approach? If so, how do I apply it to the angle of the simple deform modifier?
Thank you!