How to trample foliage underfoot in PaintFX?

[Aikiman]

As far as I know the dynamics in PFX are kind of pseudo, meaning you dont really use fields to control them. Instead they have their own internal algorithms going on so you cant really have interaction with other components of Maya as you probably want. If you want to trample grass underfoot dynamically I would use Maya Fur grass preset and attach a detailed hair system (nurbs curves only) to your surface also. Then you can attach your hair system to your fur and have forces dynamically interact with the nurbs curves which in turn affect your grass.
If you connect a radial field using max distance to the feet of your charcter, the field will now collide with your hair system. You will definately need to play around with the hairs damp values and perhaps stiffness so that it doesnt bouce back after the field has gone and instead stays flat.

The idea of folliage falling from a tree I would go with nCloth. Duncan has a great example of using PFX tree and converting to polys then converting leaves to nCloth and attach to the trunk using glue constraint. If you again use a field parented to your characters head and with a low glue value, the field can knock the leaves off your tree and have them float realistically to the ground.

[Duncan]

Nowadays the easy thing to do is select all your folliage, create a pfx modifier node then parent this node to your character, scaling it to be somewhat larger than the character. On the modifier make widthScale = 1.0 (no effect) then increase the force for the desired amount of repulsion. Adjusting the dropoff can be useful as well.

If you want a bit better collisions and wiggle on released branches and such you could create curves for the plants (start cv at ground) and make them dynamic( on hair menu ). Then set the follicles to attach at base only. One can collide geometry with these hair curves or use collision constraints. These curves can then be used as control curves for the pfx foliage.

Duncan

[Vollands]

Great stuff, thanks very much for your help!

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