Animating the amount of vegitation in a scene

#1

Hi guys, I’m currently working on a project that will require a progression from many trees and eventually become only a few over a timelapse. Off the top of my head I cannot think of how this could be done. The amount of scatter objects does not seem to be able to be animated and I don’t think the ecosystem density or presence of vegitation can be either. I know the edit object settings are able to be animated but I don’t think it can completely remove the plant at a given time.

Any ideas on if this is possible in Vue?

#2

Although i am not sure about the way you want this change to look, i can think of something using e.g. After Effects (that is if vegetation amount is not animatable).

It doesn’t matter whether you have an animation or not in your scene.

All you have to do, is to render the same scene, using in each different render a different amount of vegetation.

After you complete the renders, take them into AE and when you want the change to happen dissolve into the next render with the different amount of vegetation.

Given, that the rest of the scene will be the same (landscapes, light, etc), you will get the effect you want in an artistic way, and i think people that will watch this, will get the point.

#3

Yeah I’ve definitely been considering that, the only downside is the that the scene is pretty complicated and the render times will add up. It would be a different look like you said but it would still be effective. I’ll give it a day or two more then go ahead with that.

edit: Actually now that I think about it, I probably will not have to animate the entire camera animation every time, just starting at the point where I want the transition. I’m going to try a few tests.

#4

not sure if this will work
but if you add a plant to an ecosystem then on the density tab click the little box where it says variable density, then right click on the large sphere and choose edit function,
in the big blank space on the window that apears, right click and choose add texture map node and then animated map,
you should be able to load a grey scale image sequence in here that will determine the density of your plants
have not tried it but have used a single image to determine density like this

hope this helps you
regards
Al

#5

The problem with all those things is the “populate” button. Because this must be handled manually, no automation on that I fear.

One other option would be to animate the plants via the plant editor (create different variations ar different timeline positions) and save those as vobs - for later, animated, use in your ecosystem.

The probem with this is that then the plants do not have variations anymore (because they are vobs and not veg files), you therefore need to create several master plants manually.

#6

I am no expert in Vue, so this is just an idea.

Create your vegetation as per ecosystem, and convert them into objects in a separate layer.
Use a python script to remove some of the objects from that layer during rendering (I don’t know if this is possible?). If deleting is not possible “on the fly” then maybe it’s possible to just “hide from render”.
By manually grouping vegetations into different layers, you could then even control what would be removed at what point in the animation, if you create your script taking care of the layer index and timeframe.

#7

not sure if this will work
but if you add a plant to an ecosystem then on the density tab click the little box where it says variable density, then right click on the large sphere and choose edit function,
in the big blank space on the window that apears, right click and choose add texture map node and then animated map,
you should be able to load a grey scale image sequence in here that will determine the density of your plants

Tried and doesnt work, like wabe says the problem is the populate button, seems strange that you can add an animated texture as a density node but then cant use it, wonder if a script could automatically apply the populate on a per frame basis,
I cant script for toffee so any ideas on this would be good, becouse this would add another dimension to the animation and viz to something like forrest growth over a period of time or even deforrestation over a period

#8

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