I've got a project coming up where I have to animate some composite scenes, as if the camera is panning slightly. That's pretty straightforward, however one of the background photos has a grass field that's clearly getting blown by wind, and I think it would look pretty obvious that it's just a static photo if I didn't try and ripple the grass somehow. Just wondering if you guys had any ideas for that, if you get what I'm saying!
Re: Making windy grass? by Ben Trahair on Jul 26, 2008 at 8:55:04 am
If you have access to trapcode particular you could make a particle based grass field.
You could create a simple custom particle (keep it really small or your render hit will be huge - say 200x50 pixels) and animate it with the puppet tool swaying from side to side.
A quick particular recipe would be something like:
These settings will depend entirely on your comp/layer size of course - for me in a 720x576 pal widescreen comp.
A box emitter with 11000 particles/s
Velocity=0
An emitter x size of 2570 Y size of 1 and Z of size of 4650 was satisfactory.
Set life of your particle duration to the length of the comp
Tip: Make sure your particle duration is the same length as your comp otherwise you will get grass blades randomly disappearing.
Choose your custom particle.
set your layer time sampling to random - loop.
Set a keyframe for particles/second at 11000 at frame 0 and move forwards to about 4:24 set a second keyframe at 11000. Then move forward 1 frame to 5 seconds and set a third one with a value of zero. This 5 seconds lead up gives your particle grass enough time to "grow".
Another tip is to pre-render your particle layer to save render times.
Re: Making windy grass? by James Jacksons on Jul 26, 2008 at 4:34:04 pm
use CC HAIR it works well for flowing windy grass.. or use particle illusion 3.0 they have a grass particle ready to use
there is many other ways but cc hair is prolly the easiest and its right in Ae
