Animating seasons effect on trees?
by Homam Bahnassi This a one nifty trick to animate growing trees using XSI particles. In the animation you can see how the tree leaves start to grow, then as they get older they start to go yellow, and finally they falloff and fly with the wind. Doing such effects with particles is really fun, since you can control animation for all leaves through dynamics (collision, forces, etc), in addition to the animation control which enables you to grow and change the leaves color as they grow older, and of course, you still get the full shading/shadowing for rendered particles/leaves (even in real-time as in the capture). You can use the particle sketching tool to define particles for the tree leaves, or you can use simple shapes to emit particles from (that is what I have done in the example). One last note, it is not really fast in rendering, especially if you are rendering with soft shadows with area lights, so if youre planning to render a rain forest it may not be your best option but it
