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Cutting grass
Looking to create an animation of a mower cutting grass, with a cutaway of the deck. So, need to know what I need to do this.
1) I’ve bought some poly object grass models, and they are OK, but would like to make the case to get the Hair module to grow my own. Would this module make it easier and look better?
2) What do I need to get the grass tips to come off and direct how they fly around, would I use the dynamics to sever the tips then Particles to create some green grass tips flying around? Hmm, or could dynamics do both?
3) Would I use the one grass object created by the hair module or would I need a separate element for the grass particles flying around? ie, one system to create the grass, another system to show the particles moving?
This will be a slow motion demonstration of what happenes when the grass gets cut, mulched and driven back into the turf.
Think of one small grass tips’ journey from being cut off the grass blade, blown around the cutting chamber, bouncing off the blades a couple times, maybe getting smaller each time, then being blown back into the turf. A rough life, it was.
I know I can animate all this, but I’m thinking there would be a mroe elegant way of approaching this. I’ve talked my boss into letting me do this in C4D and not AE, so I hope to make it look good.
Right now I’ve got the Engineering edition of C4D, so there might be some module purchases in my future
Thanks all! I get a great deal of information from the forum!
Matt
Its more fun to ride a slow motorcycle fast than a fast motorcycle slow…
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4 Replies
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Grass would work very well for the shot of the mower cutting a path. In that case I would use an animated texture to control the length of the grass, and animate the mower to follow the path.
For the part where the blade of grass interacts with the cutting chamber and blades I think you would be best off doing it by hand, or possibly with Thinking Particles. In the latter case, I would have the blades generating grass particles with the housing as a deflector object. You could set it up so more particles are generated when the original partcles rebound and strike the blades. Twould be a bit complex, however, if you don’t have TP experience.
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Maybe this will help.
https://www.base80.com/index.php/2008/07/22/mow_the_lawn_hair_proximal_tracer -
Randy I did see that tutorial, and if I have the time I will use that in the start of my animation, but mainly this will show inside the deck. I’d like to use it and I can easily modify it to fit my needs. I love tutorials!
Adam-
Good ideas, I like the TP idea. I dread thinking of having to do it by hand, but if that’s the way to do it, so be it. I’d like to try my hand atTP, though. I have some experience dealing with particles in AE and others, so I have a handle on how they work, just need to know where the buttons are 🙂I’m envisioning several emitters, including ones at the blade like you said. It will just be a matter of controlling and directing them. I have not used TP yet, but I’m itching to get my mitts on it. I’m pretty tenacious when I get a cool challenge like this. I think the look they are going for is a kind of slow motion organized chaos of grass particles.
Before I get there, though, I have one important question- I have made some decent looking grass with the HAIR module. Is there a way to cut the tips off the grass and keep the tips? Do they have to be 2 different systems, or is there a way to slice an object into 2 separate objects (animated)? The grass will NOT be moving. Just picture a single blade of grass that gets the top 1/3rd of it sliced off by a slow moving blade.
Thanks, I’ll be starting to work on this tomorrow and most of next week!
The whole point of all this is to match move this animation to superimpose over live footage of mowing decks. So being able to reposition the camera and shift the field of view and and such is a great thing!
Matt
Its more fun to ride a slow motorcycle fast than a fast motorcycle slow…
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I don’t think there’s any way to split hairs, unfortunately. Sorry for the bad pun, too.
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