Maya Leaves

#1

Hey guys,

I’m having trouble filling some branches with leaves that would also be dynamic and affected by a wind nucleus.

I’ve tried a few techniques mentioned in tutorials around the web, but the results are not quite satisfactory. My problem is that I cannot make the leaves(which are just planes for individual leaf) to stick out of the surface properly. They are either going through the geometry of other leaves or branches, or they are not rotated properly( the bit that should be attached to the branch is floating in mid air while the actual leaf is going inside the geometry of the tree). The closest to the desired result I was by using particles to instantiate the leaf geometry with dynamics applied to it. However, the problem is the one mentioned above, they are rotated wierdly.

Has anybody got a good technique for this?

Thanks!

#2

I’m going to assume you’re using Maya for this. My first suggestion is to try posting in the maya specific forums as you might have more luck getting a response there. As for an actual response to the question: I would look into paintFX… you can get some pretty great results with a bit of fiddling. Some of the preset trees are already set up with dynamics, though I don’t think they use a nucleus. You’ll also probably want to use your own textures and shaders though as the default ones aren’t the nicest.