Some instancing test

[n_rehberg]

Hi,

I had some free time so I took a look at instancing vegetation with bifrost. I like the node approach and also the idea to keep the data "live" so I can animate or modify my vegetation in a scene if needed. Here are some results.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tViV2ubbfGg

So far I really like what you can do with the graph. The wind animation could use a lot more love though, at the moment it is just 2 fractals.

Since I found the answer to most of problems in stuff other people shared, I'll attach the maya files for these scenes here too. I did not make compounds of those main nodes, since I tend to go back in and tweak them pretty often. But feel free to do so if you like them.

And I did not include the scattered vegetation stand-ins I used, so it won't render like shown. But there is preview geo for the viewport in the graph.

Have fun,

Nico

[jonah.friedman]

Great work! I enjoyed looking through your scenes too. 

These images are just screenshots from Nico's scene files and YouTube videos - I'm just attaching them here because I think people respond to images and I think these are pretty exciting. 

[pivotgeeks]

Hi, so you can like create a tree and have it react to wind and stuff inside Bifrost?? 

[n_rehberg]

Well since Bifrost lets you go down to bare metal polygon creation you could probably create a full tree generator in it.

What I did, if you look at my example, is to take an existing tree mesh (trunk and first 2 levels of branches) and displaced it with 2 different "noises" to get the swaying motion and some flutter into the branches. Then I scattered stand-ins containing twigs and leaves onto those branches and added some animated noise to their rotation.

Now instead of those noises you could use other things to drive the animation. Maybe a wind texture. And if you want to get real fancy you could probably use velocities from a simulated fluid to drive the displacement and rotation. Or rebuild the whole tree hierarchy inside of bifrost so you don't have to displace the mesh, but are able to rotate the branches at their base. In the end most of it is just math and figuring out what needs to move or rotate in which direction.

[pivotgeeks]

ahh that's nice, i did download your example file, I'm not a technical artist, didn't understand the graph, but I liked the simple small animation on tree, I am going to learn Bifrost it will help my current personal project...