Animations

botaniq comes with procedural wind animations. There are two animation types currently:

• Default animation moves groups randomly without any period. This has the most realistic result.

• Looping animation loops at 120 frames. In most cases it does not look as realistic as the Default but saves memory and is quicker in the viewport.

Animation speed

Animations in botaniq are not designed to be real-time. They work almost real-time if you have high end machine. However, animation can be previewed at a lower FPS. As botaniq is mainly meant to be used in a raytracer, the performance of the animation itself is almost never the bottleneck of the user rendered scenes. If you take into account the time that it takes to render individual frames then the actual computation of the animation is only negligible.

Supported categories

Animation is currently supported in the following categories:

• coniferous
• deciduous

Animations Panel

Buttons to add and remove animation and control properties are located in this panel.

• Add Animation adds either a Default or a Looping animation to selected objects.
• Make Instance wraps object into instance collection. Wrapping into instance collection makes the asset easier to manipulate and duplicating it does not duplicate all the data. More information in instancing section.
• Remove Animation button removes the animation data from selected objects. If your animated trees are instanced then the instance itself will not be removed.

Warning

Animations can only be added to editable assets. This is due to the use of modifiers. You need to convert to editable before adding animations.

Tip

Enable Automatic Make Instance to save memory and performance at the cost of customizability.

Animation Settings

• Wind Preset row. There are 3 wind presets - breeze, wind and storm. Each of these disables some of the modifiers. Select the preset of your choice and click the Set button to apply it to the selected botaniq objects.
• Strength value effects how much the trees are influenced by the wind animation.
• Active Object section describes the state of animation on active object. If multiple instances of the same tree exist there is a Make Unique button that can create new duplicate of the instance so it can be further customized.

Advanced Settings

The advanced panel allows you to tweak what the animation looks like beyond the basic presets.

botaniq animations are created using modifiers and f-curves moving different vertex groups or UV maps. A list of animation controlling modifiers is displayed in the advanced panel where each modifier has:

• Amplitude slider that lets you customize the influence of the modifier
• Viewport Visibility toggle that hides the modifier from viewport.
• Enabled checkbox which toggles the modifier on/off completely.

Instancing

Objects with a lot of animated properties (location, rotation, values inside modifiers) that are changing every frame are complex to calculate. This can cause slow viewport view and slower renders. This can be mitigated by wrapping the original animated object into a collection and instancing this collection within a empty object at multiple places.

Because botaniq animated assets are computationally expensive we create instances for you. When the animation is added and Automatic Make Instance is checked an instance is created in your scene and placed in the animation_instances collection.

Having multiple instances of one object means that the customization is done to the instanced object itself. Customizing individual instances is not possible, you have to create new object that has a different configuration.

Using instancing greatly improves performance. Check out the FPS difference between one tree and a lot of trees in the gif below. There is not much of a difference. It can still run considerably well in viewport. We do not suggest trying that with editable meshes.

Instanced objects are also easier to manipulate, you can select the whole hierarchy with one click. There will not be any hanging children objects that were not selected and did not move with the parent.

Animation tips

Previewing animations

Rendering animations is very time consuming. We recommend rendering a test render using the Workbench to preview the whole animation before rendering in Cycles. Make sure you set the color settings to texture to get most realistic preview.

Scattering animated trees

To scatter animated trees use the Add Animation Button but make sure that the Automatic Make Instance button is not on. Blender particle systems work only with editable objects. Afterwards add the animated asset to the particle system.