Building a tree with the sapling and im kind of new to the add-on, but one of the things i noticed is so i make my tree (which i cannot seem to get the trunk to get wider as a side note if anyone knows) anyways, so i get it all setup and disable leaves for performance but whenever i add an armature and then click animate armature my computer shits itself. 8gb ddr3, 6x3.2ghz cpu, 6970 gpu, so im assuming its just too much. so what i was wondering is if there is a way to add armatures to the trunk and the first level of branches and not allllll of its little branches so that wind would show some movement. or possibly a different rigging method? also does anyone know if leaves move with wind inside the sapling editor or do you have to use the wind force to get that to work?
How detailed it your tree. Can you post a screenshot?
Yeah if the tree gets too complex all hell breaks loose, especially on my shitbox.
On the leaves,
there is code in utils.py to enable particle leaves. Haven’t tried that yet.
When the addon was being written I suggested soft body leaves, never went any where. Here is the code
#### Quick hack to add PINS for softbody leaves
i = 0
pinGroup = leafObj.vertex_groups.new("PIN")
#pin = []
verts = leafMesh.vertices
print("adding pinning")
while i < len(verts):
pinGroup.add([verts[i].index],1.00,'ADD')
pinGroup.add([verts[i+3].index],0.50,'ADD')
i += 6
# END QUICK HACK TO ADD SOFT BODY LEAVES
This goes between these lines on about line 761
leafMesh.from_pydata(leafVerts,(),leafFaces)
leafMesh.validate()
Add soft body to the leaf mesh and use PIN as a soft body goal. Whack the push and pull up high on edge springs to stop them warping too much. You could also use a different value than 0.5 for the weight of the outer stem. As a test too if you edit the leaves on a leaf if you remove the armature vg and make the pin weights zero that leaf will fly off.