Looping Onyx Treestorm trees

#1

Hi,

I’ve been asked to create some looping wallpaper animations of a forest, and I’m trying to figure out a way of looping Treestorm trees.

There is nothing immediately apparent in the wind settings for Treestorm to suggest they can be looped, so I thought about point caching the mesh and wondering if I could offset the animation and morph between the offset versions to blend.

However, the morph only takes a static frame rather than an animated mesh, which means this approach won’t work.

Has anyone else tried this?

The alternative is to not use wind and just animate using noise and other modifiers I guess, but it would be nice to get it working within Treestorm itself.

Thanks,

Steve

#2

I have wondered about this as well. We tend to run most of our archvis animations below 1200 frames. So I baked out a few animated proxies at 1200 frames. This is obviously not a great solution, and doesnt help your situation. But I would love to hear that there is a way to loop.

Regards,
Mike

#3

Hi Mike,

Closest I’ve found is

http://vitsly.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/loopable-flag/

Not sure if it will work with something like a tree though.

I guess the brute force way would be to export multiple morphs of the frames covering the transition and animate them one-by-one.

Cheers

Steve

#4

Update

If you have it, Morph-o-matic seems to load in live animated meshes (if you set it to autoload)

There is a trial available,

I’m going to have a play with it over the weekend to see how it looks looping it that way.

Cheers,

Steve

#5

hello Steve

I too am trying to get onyx to loop with no sucess…did morph o matic work for u?is it possible??

thx

Nildo

#6

Hi,

yeah, it worked although you still need to point cache a tree with a portion you can blend,

so I did -100 frames set aside for the blend, point cached it and duplicated the cached tree, then set the offsets so that it would finish where the first one started, then used that as a blend.

I found VRayproxy was pretty unstable working with them though. MR Proxy seems much better, although it takes a while to create since it renders thumbnails for every frame. Not sure if it’s possible to disable that.

Cheers

Steve

#7

Hey Steve. When baking animated proxies I make sure to have both objects off screen, and uncheck the automatic zoom extents. This way the preview render is empty and fast.

Regards,
Mike

#8

Cool tip Mike!

Thanks

#9

On a side note, I’ve not been too impressed with the development of Treestorm.

It’s been virtually unchanged for a few years now, and I didn’t get any response from their support with regards to questions on looping animations.

It will be interesting to see what happens with the Speedtree tech now that nvidia have their hands on it.

Cheers

Steve

#10

Hey Steve…

Thx alot for the reply…i’ll try to use as you said.

And yeah i agree with you on its development…their standalone soft gives much to be desired :(.

Nildo

#11

Steve,

I posed that same question to Pjer (treestorm).
His suggestion was to animate over say 500 frames then reverse the frames (in Post).

Hardly a cleaver solution…

TS is OK, but with very many anuimated trees in your scene, the thing slows to a crawl…

I am still waiting for Davey from Mcstudios to let me buy a license for their product.

You do know you can render out frames with an alpha and just apply that to a plane.
Frome a distance it looks pretty good.

I did this as a quick test http://www.dustinproductions.com/wip/tree-movement-billboard.mov
David

#12

Hi,

the ping-pong looks pretty obvious to be honest.

with regards to the ‘sprite’ method, I have to do changing times of day, so I don’t think it would work that well since the self shadowing wouldn’t stay the same, and you couldn’t offset the animation if the timelapse was baked into the sprite.

At the moment, the morphing method seems the least worst workaround.

Cheers

Steve

#13

Yeah thats what I thought too (ping pong).
They did recode it after we found a glitch in the animation of the trees.
Certain boughs would rotate strangely.
We brought it to their attention and they re-wrote the code (I guess).

The end result was the animation was correct, but the overhead for the animated trees was horiffic…
Looked cool though.

BTW, Morph-o-matic looks pretty cool.
Any problems with net-rendering with it I wonder?
EDIT: “All Di-O-Matic plug-in include free unlimited rendering node support”

#14

Well, if I was doing it I would convert them all to proxies first anyway, so there wouldn’t be Morph-o-matic used in the final scene, just as an interim step to get the loop.

#15

So you would use a point cache on the proxy?

I am not sure how that would work (not sure as in I dont understand it).

David

#16

Workflow is

Create a tree with enough animation to cover the transition

Point cache it

Duplicate tree

Offset one animation so that the first frame of one tree picks up where the last frame of the other ends

Use Morphomatic to blend over 100 frames

Create proxy from that.

Duplicate proxies and offset the playback frames, since they loop now, it should be seamless.

Cheers

Steve

#17

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