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.

Creating the Growing Tree Effect for my Animation

Now that a large bulk part of my animation has been created, I turned to creating the animation of a tree growing. Due to the interconnectivity of the branches and the way I intend on the tree growing, I predicted that this would be the most difficult part in my animation to produce.

Due to my limited knowledge of Cinema 4D I located a tutorial by MotionSquared which taught me a way to create a growing tree using Hair objects and tools. 

The first thing I did when creating my tree was create a base for the tree to grow from. I created a small plane object in the centre of the screen. Following this step, With the plane selected I went to the Simulate dropdown and selected Hair Objects, Add hair. 

After this I selected the Guides submenu in the Object Manager where most of the next steps occur.

With this step completed, the plane now has 4 hairs pointing upwards which fall when the animation is played. This is because of the way hair is affected by the gravity of the scene and shows that the hair is attached to the plane. To stop this select Dynamics and uncheck Enable.

Change the Root count of the object to 1 and change the Root  drop down to Polygon Centre. This hair will serve as the tree trunk so the length should be adjusted to the height needed. I changed the root length to 500cm. Moving then to the Generate tab, I changed the render Type to Circle creating several hairs in a thicker shape. 

In the Hairs tab, I clicked the Roots dropdown and changed the Root to As Guides which generates a basic line for my structure to be generated from.

Now selected the hair texture, I selected the Hair Thickness tab and adjusted the settings to create a trunk around the hair line.

With this tree trunks generated procedurally it lacks the imperfections which tree trunks have when they grow. To counter this, In the hair materials basic menu I checked the Kink box in that tab I changed the settings to the ones below which gave the tree trunk the imperfections which i wanted. 

Until texturing or later on in the project, the tree trunk is completed for now.

I then set about creating the first set of branches which come from the tree and due to the fact they will work in a similar process I duplicated the Trunk object and renamed it Branches. I also duplicated and renamed the Material used as this is essential to the manipulation and animation of the secondary branches.

Inside the Branches object I went into the Guides tab and dragged Trunk into the Link box at the top of the menu. 

The trunk then has a duplicate on the top of it which looks very out of place and to fix this I changed the Root area type to Polygon Area and the root count to however many branches I wanted, in this case 7.

With the branches now existing and being parented to the trunk, the next step would be the sizing and positioning of the branches.

In the Guides tab there is a dropdown named Editing which includes various buttons including Re-Root and Regrow which will be essential to the creation of the tree. By clicking Re-Root, the root area of the  branches is randomly places and by clicking Regrow, the branches are reset to these root positions.
The branches can then be resized in the same way as the trunk.

With branches of trees generally being thinner than the main trunk, they naturally Kink more and subsequently in my animation I will have to adjust the Kink of the Branches until I am happy with the result. However, due to the generation process, the placement of the branches is quite uniform and gaps between look unnatural.
To fix this I selected the Simulate dropdown and used the Hair Selection and Hair Tools to reposition and move the branches.

With the branches created to a pleasing level of quality, I repeated the process for the tertiary branches which I named Twigs. The process used was exactly the same as before but the branches created were smaller and more existed. In the Guides tab rather than having the trunk as the Link, Branches became the Link.

At this point I realised that my object did not only look like a tree but also veins and changed from the initial concept deciding that if an extra layer of branches/twigs was added on top of the twigs, the growth would be significantly more visually striking.
With the versatility of veins in regards to the organic nature of my animation, they could be used frequently and with little effort as this asset will have already been created.

With the current purpose of this animation undecided, I decided that the model was complete and I could begin animation without colouring the object.

Producing the Kaleidoscope effect for the Animation

In my animation, there is a sequence where the camera flies through a series of tunnels where the walls are constantly shifting and changing in a way similar to a kaleidoscope.

To produce this technique I based my idea off a tutorial on Greyscale Gorrila which helps to produce stylized low poly images using Cinema 4D.

http://vimeo.com/54563392


To begin with, I created a sphere object and changed the object properties to Icosahedron and unchecking render perfect. By changing the type to Icosahedron, The mesh changes to a triangular mesh which will help create the edges which make the low poly look so unique.

 This image shows what the mesh looks like. To view the object in this way go to the display dropdown and selected Gouraud Shading (Lines).

From here I went to the Create dropdown, selected deformer and then clicked on the Displacer deformer to create one.





I then dragged the displacer into the sphere and the mesh of the sphere changed into a less smooth, more deformed shape. Inside the shading submenu in object properties, I selected noise and manipulated the settings in a way which I thought looked the best.

Once I was happy with this step, I went into the deformer menu again and this time created a polygon reduction object which I placed inside the sphere with the displacer (but not inside it).

When I placed the polygon reduction inside the sphere, the sphere changed to a more basic version of the previous state, with reduced polygons making the edges and faces more basic and defined. The effect can be manipulated using the object properties in the polygon reduction object and by adjusting the reduction strength. I decided that the looks gained from using 50% strength looked how I wanted it to.

Now that I had a basic shape to work off, I created a crude 3 Tone gradient texture using very dramatic colouring and applied it to the object. This effect can be easily manipulated at a later date to make a better colour scheme.

Now I have the object I will be using for making the walls of the kaleidoscope tunnel, I could begin working on animating the object. First of all, I created a Symmetry object and placed the sphere inside it.

If the object hadn't been centred properly, I would move the sphere to ensure that the sphere was duplicated correctly. In this instance I made the Symmetry Object's Mirror Plane ZY, although this can be manipulated in future to get different results.

Selecting the MoGraph dropdown, I created a cloner object and placed the Symmetry tag inside.

Using the settings above, I manipulated the cloner until I had a flower like pattern with the object as each petal.
While creating these settings, I made sure to allow a hole through the centre of the "Flower".






Finally to animate this step, I basically just keyframed changed to the radius making the image shrink and grow, changing the colours of the kaleidoscope.

Once I have created several kaleidoscopes I intend on animating a camera to pass through the centre of the "Flower" into the next kaleidoscope and either looping indefinitely or slowly transforming into the next stage of my animation