Here is a piece I just finished up which I thought was worth sharing.
I imported a tree from Forester Arbouretum to Blender using Accutrans3d as a format converter. I colored the leaves with fall colors and then set up two particle emitters to which I parented leaves. I then sent the leaves through a lattice. I also took an RGBA Targa Render of the Tree and made an alpha channeled tree to go on several planes behind the 3d tree in the foreground. The clouds are Metaballs converted to meshes with Blender materials/textures. The grass and sky are also Blender materials/textures.
I added the still and the AVI(2MB-Microsoft MPEG4) to the top of my gallery at www.creationanimation.com.
Excellent. The animation really brings it all together. Thanks for sharing your techniques. I also liked the lighthouse and its animation. My only comment for future improvement on the tree animation, is I think the clouds are moving just a tad too slow. I realise that is personal judgement so you can ignore if you choose but I really like the motions of the leaves.
Thanks for the feedback, I also believe the clouds are kind of “Blocky”. This piece is a study for a children’s video I am animating. So, Blocky clouds may work well.
If someone has an idea how I could make the perimeter of the clouds more transparent, or make the clouds more fluffy looking, I would be glad to know about it.
I may try useing the alpha channel technique to soften the cloud in Photoshop. (Save it out as a 32 bit Targa file with an alpha channel where the edges of the alpha-ed cloud channel fade from white to black.) Then map the clouds onto planes.
Very nice looking leaves. I was going to say something about the clouds too, but if this is intended for children then the clouds couldn’t be better. Spot on.