Hi!

I have a tree I've built using the labs tree tools. It's great! I would now like to make it sway gently in a breeze.

To do this, I take the curves produced by the labs tree gen network and set up a vellum network to move them around a little, treating them like hairs. Then, I use a PointDeform to use these hairs to move the tree geometry itself around. This works great (for elaboration, I'm following this [www.youtube.com] tutorial).

My tree has Maple-like leaves (unlike the aforementioned tutorial, which has long willow-like leaves). So, I try attaching these leaves to my animated branch using a vellum AttachToGeometry constraint.

Here's where my question comes in: what I see is my leaves sort of spinning around their root pin points freely, as though they're just point-constrained, with no regard to the direction in which they originally pointed. I'm curious how I might encourage them to behave more "leaf-like", without spinning freely around the branch.

I found this article [www.tokeru.com] by @tokeru, in which they describe using a copyToPoints to pin leaves to geometry per point, but this seems to presume a different construction method than is used by the labs tree tool.

Fundamentally I feel like this is a pretty obvious thing to want: a tree that moves around with some keep-alive. So, I'm curious how others might be approaching this, and what I might be doing wrong that leads me to have this leaf-spinning-around-root-points problem?

Thank you!

As an update to my question: I've tried attaching my leaves to my animated tree mesh using a PointDeform node, which seems to work well - I can scrub the timeline and my leaves appear to rigidly 'stick' to my moving branches.

Doing this allows me to omit the AttachToGeometry constraint in my vellum network. When I sim now, though, I cannot seem to get any cloth-like flutter on the leaves at all. I admit that I don't fully understand the interplay between the pointDeform node and the vellum solver, but no matter how I adjust things like stiffness/bend/stretch, the leaves refuse to do anything other than rigidly stick to the branch.

Several attempts at googling this problem have turned up nothing useful that I can find, so trying again with posting here.

thanks!

You summoned me, so here I am.

Added a fix to the wiki:

https://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php?title=HoudiniVellum#Vellum_and_the_labs_tree [www.tokeru.com]

Had a look at your hip (which you removed from the forum?), the reason your leaves weren't fluttering was beacuse you'd pinned them both at the root and tip. The group by range where you define the leaf root is grabbing both the bottom row of the leaf, and the point at the very tip.

Swapping it to a regular group node that uses a bounding box to define the locked points, the leaves flutter as expected.

mestela
You summoned me, so here I am.

Added a fix to the wiki:

https://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php?title=HoudiniVellum#Vellum_and_the_labs_tree [www.tokeru.com]

mestela
You summoned me, so here I am.

Added a fix to the wiki:

https://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php?title=HoudiniVellum#Vellum_and_the_labs_tree [www.tokeru.com]

Hi,do you notice the point deform result has so many glicthes and errors?

Usually look at the inputs, if the vellum sim glitches, that'll pass down to the point deform.

If the vellum sim looks stable, usually playing with the point count and falloff options on the point deform can calm it down for me.

mestela
Usually look at the inputs, if the vellum sim glitches, that'll pass down to the point deform.

If the vellum sim looks stable, usually playing with the point count and falloff options on the point deform can calm it down for me.

Do you konw how to use the kinefx to deform the tree?I used that,so many ugly deformation...