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Duplicating an animated object

Zink120

Hi all,

I have animated a tree growing. There's a main trunk, and then I want lots of branches coming off it. I've animated one of the branches nicely, and if I was able to duplicate it and put it in lots of places that would be a huge time saver. Then I can work from there to give them some more variety.

The growing branch is just an animated mesh image. I found this post here: Duplicate Animation to another Element but I wasn't able to recreate the effect described.

Can anyone help, please?
Many many thanks in advance! :-)

Zink120

BinaryCats

I saw this thread on the weekend, meant to answer it before.

answer is........ meh, not really.

I mean, what you can do, is Loading Image hit the copy button on an animation. Select all keyframes for one bone, ctrl+x select the relative new bone, ctrl+v. Do that a few times and bobs your uncle. However this is these positions will be relative to its parent. for your example (above) each branch will want to have its own parent, and you can then position that parent where ever you like

Søren

You'd probably get better results by animating the branches using bones. By using bones you also get the benefit of being able to animate using rotation properly.

What do I mean by that?
If you take a look at the following image.
Loading Image

The blue square is rotated 45 degrees. If the mesh points are selected, rotated and then keyed, the path they will take is the shortest distance (the purple lines).
If you rotate the bone the mesh is attached to the vertices will follow the red line.

Here's a vine of an old project I did. The branch could just be copied and placed elsewhere and keys offset to make it look like the branches are growing along with the main stem.

https://vine.co/v/M9u5pxvLYqK

BinaryCats

I Missed the mesh bit 🙁

Zink120

Hello,

Thanks both for the replies :-) Yes, I had a feeling when I was doing it that I really should have been using bones. I'm still quite new at this! I think I understand what you're saying though, BinaryCats.

Shiu, that vine is spectacular and exactly the kind of thing I'm trying to achieve! Would you please be able to shed a little light on how you did it? The part I'm most curious about is getting things to grow out from a particular spot, for example that smaller stem with the leaf at the end - how did you get it to grow from that spot on the vine? Was it a finished frame squished down into one spot that you gradually stretched out again? Any tips would be hugely appreciated!!

Søren

Sure thing.

First a couple of important notes.
The images for both the main branch and the smaller branch is straight. They are made straight so they can be used for many different branches. If I drew the branches curved, it would not deform as well.

The animation of the main branch is done by placing a temporary image underneath that I use as a guide. This image is merely a wavy line.

I key the Y movement of the entire branch. At frame 0 the branch is below ground, and then I key it at it's max Y position at a later frame.
At this point it's also very important to make that movement non-linear. I start fast and then it slows to a halt. Doing this step after step 3 means the rotated bones will no longer follow the curve.
I start rotating each bone so the tip of the bone follows the curve underneath. Repeat this until you are at the end. The more bones you have the smoother it will be, but you don't need to go crazy with the amount of bones since smoothing skinning weights does a lot on it's own.

For the smaller branches I first place the bones in the end position where the branch is fully grown and then turn the scale down to almost 0. Something like 0.05. If I used a scale of 0 the rotation would not be easy to control. I also turn off scaling inheritance on all the bones of the smaller branch.
Then I scale the bones up one by one to make it appear like the branch is growing.

I hope this helps 🙂

Zink120

Hi Shiu,

That is extremely helpful, thanks so much. I also found the video tutorial you made on it, and downloaded the example for a closer look. This should be the breakthrough I needed! haha

Many thanks :-)