Leaves Falling

nngafook

Hi there!

To keep it simple, let's say I want to animate a tree swaying, and leaves falling and fading out as they fall (not randomly spawned like a particle system, could be "hard coded" animation).

Is there some way to duplicate a slot with a leaf image just for the animation, or do I have to create multiple slots to achieve this?

Thanks!

nngafook

nimbling

That depends, if you want your leaves to move separately, you'll need duplicated bones, not just slots.

Both bones and slots can be duplicated, and then moved / and or reparented in the tree view, as long as you do so in setup mode.

Did I parse your question correctly?

nngafook

Yep makes sense!

I was hoping I could dupe the bones/slots only for the animation, kind of like how you can change the draw order as part of the animation. Instead of having a bunch of leaf bones/slots.

Thanks!

24andahalf

nngafook ：
I was hoping I could dupe the bones/slots only for the animation, kind of like how you can change the draw order as part of the animation. Instead of having a bunch of leaf bones/slots.

That's like saying you want to have extra legs during your walk to work but never any other time. As far as I know it's not going to work like that.

I don't know all the details of your setup for the tree but I had to do sparkle FX on a character and I felt the same as you. I didn't want to have extra bones and slots all over the characters body to account for every single sparkle they will cast off during animation. My solution was to make only enough bones + slots to deal with as many sparkles(or in your case leaves) as will ever be on screen at a time.

So if you'll over ever have 3 leaves on screen at a time then only make 3 separate sets of bones. I had one main bone the animation would stem off of and named it something like sparkle01Location . From there I had a few extra bones and slots to animate the sparkles as I wanted. Then once the sparkle faded out I moved the bone to another location on the body where it would be animating next. This way I only needed 3 sets of bones to cover something like 12 locations where sparkles would be shooting out of.

I hope that helps.

nngafook

Yep! Makes sense!

Thanks for the reply!

Cheers.