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Tree branches & leaves gently flowing in a breeze animation:
I have a customer who wants his logo (that is an oak tree) to be animated. He wants the branches and leaves of the tree to move back and forth like it would if it were a breezy summer day. It should be a subtle effect and should loop; and have a sound that accompanies it – like what it sounds like when wind blows the boughs of a tree. Anyway, I’m a complete AE noob – I got the trial version and this animation sequence needs to be done and placed in a flash movie that loops for the top portion of this customer’s website. I’m not an animator and I thought I could accomplish this animation requirement using maybe a plugin or something in After Effects. Is there such a module that can generate this animation, what should I use to create it and can it be output to Flash CS3? I’m on OSX and I use the Web Premium CS3 suite of apps right now. I downloaded AE because I felt sure it could do something like this. I don’t have time to animate this frame by frame, obviously. Any help is appreciated!!!
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6 Replies
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[Dave LaRonde] “You could get the branches to move by using the Puppet Tool (there’s a how-to on the Adobe web site), but getting those those leaves to move in the wind scares me. “
This isn’t going to be easy no matter how you do it, but what I would suggest is creating an animation of one leaf fluttering in a pre-comp, then in another pre-comp importing a few of these leaves and animating them together using time-remapping to offset the animation, different rotations and scales for each leaf. Then import this cluster of leaves a few times into your final tree comp and do the same thing again, offset the times with time-remap, rotate them, scale them and perhaps parent them to puppet points on your tree layer via expressions…
All in all, to get a good result, this is going to be tough… especially if it’s your first time in AE. The best way to do this requires a lot of knowledge about some of the more advanced features in AE. I hope you have about 3 months to learn them =/
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
If you have access to a 3d modeling program you might be better off using that.. (if not blender3d is free and not TOO hard to learn)
I’ve been using AEcs3 for a year now, but the thought of animating a tree scares the crap out of me.. I’d hate to have to do that for a client…
Welcome to AE 🙂
Good luck.
-Jeremy
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Here’s what I was able to come up with using the aforementioned technique. It still needs some work. I would definitely change a few things about the way I did this, but it’s a proof of concept that I slapped together in a few minutes so for now the tree is doing a slow dance (;
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Damn that’s nice.
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EXTREMELY impressive Darby!
great job bro
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Hello Darby,
I cant manage to see your movie with trees. Do you have another link to it, please?
Thank you!
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