Animating the Growing Tree effect for my Animation

Continuing from my last post, this is the process I used to animate the veins growing which proved more difficult than expected.

From watching MotionSquared's video I realised that the process of animating the growth of the veins relies entirely on keyframing the length of the branches. However when this happens there is no fluidity to the growth and all of the branches begin growing at once ruining the illusion that the growth is stemming from one place.

In order to counter this I would have to create a static version of the veins in the same project that the animated veins could use as reference and follow.

To begin this process I have to create a duplicate of each Hair object and rename it. For ease of access, I renamed the duplicated object _____Ref. For instance the Trunk duplicate was renamed Trunk Ref and so on. To keep the workspace clean and for convenience I placed the Reference versions inside the originals.

















To maintain all information about the object, the materials will also have to duplicated and renamed. As I renamed the textures for the references, I made sure to place them on the relevant object and delete the previous texture from that object.

From this point, I changed the links from the original hair object, to the reference object. For instance, The Branches link would change from Trunk to Trunk Reference. This step would also apply to the references themselves to maintain a hierarchy between the references so The Branches link would also change from Trunk to Trunk Reference.

The next part of the development relies on all the references being invisible so I hid all of the references by clicking the upper circle in the object manager to hide the object in the normal view.

The basic theory behind the animation is that the animation itself is based entirely off keyframing the length of the hairs. Without necessary reference, this animation would fail, as all of the branches would grow at the same time and without being rooted to anything.

From this point, the development started to become much easier and I could begin animating.

At the beginning of the animation, the length of all the branches (not the reference branches) was set to 0% so that nothing was visible apart from the base. Methodically through this, I keyframed a time later on and set the branch length to 100%. After I was satisfied with how the trunk object was animated, I moved up to the branches and repeated the process further along in the animation, causing the branches to grow after the trunk. Manipulating the appearance of growth I eventually had the final tendrils growing slightly quicker towards the end of the animation to give a slight boost to the movement in case I wanted to use this as a transition.

The animation now worked successfully and I was contented with the final result I had achieved as a basic tree animation.

Thinking back to the way I had achieved the second Kaleidoscope technique seeing what happened when the original object was placed inside a Cloner, I decided to trial this technique with the Tree Growths.

Placing all of the tree objects inside a null and placing that inside a Cloner achieved surprising results. With all the previous animations I created forming a sort of tunnel like animation, this technique added to that with complex growth added in as well. 

Having experience with the Cloner tool due to the previous stages of animation, I experimented with keyframing the Radius of the new effect causing the finished circle to spread out creating a hole in the middle. Seeing this hole, I realised that the reveal of the gap was an ideal point to loop the animation creating a good end to the animation.