Sprouting fern

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I want to animate this movement:

I already animated that cursed plant with keyframes, but I figured I could somehow cut corners with some smart rigging. It appears that it’s much harder than I thought… I tried a very simple setup with copy rotation, didn’t work even remotely. Than I switched to transform constraint and it was better, still eons away from working like I want it to. Now I run out of ideas, since my rigging skills are pretty basic. What I find most problematic is making a spiral that “unwraps”, sort of like a carpet if you look at it from the side.
It would be great if you could point me in the right direction.

2

That’s actually pretty cool! I can work with that. I’ll still need to animate the leaves, but couple of drivers should do the trick. Thanks!

3

Dang, greentest1.blend looks great. I’ve got to figure out how to use bones more effectively.

@Liero: Ever think of putting to gether a video tutorial on how so set something like that up?

4

@liero: that scripted thing is awesome! I’ll dig into it tomorrow and see if I can understand how it actually works :stuck_out_tongue: Meanwhile I second Atom in tutorial request :slight_smile:

5

The animateall script is like having the grow radius and the roto bezier all in one. FYI

6

it is just a few steps, you need both scripts from file -unfold and add noise-

  1. model a tree like shape from a single vertex, use only edges, subdivide and smooth in edit mode
  2. add a Skin modifier then Ctrl+A to shrink/grow some vertices then press ‘Create Armature’
  3. run unfold script on armature, Rotation time should be larger than Scaling time, also enable ‘Point’
  4. can add some noise to bones rotation with the other script -it adds modifiers to fcurves-
  5. can also increase editbones Curved Bones segments -use right click > copy to selected-

this is not a generic solution, here an example of settings: https://db.tt/bb5S8P80

7

I did the first, very basic test using Liero’s unfolding script (just that for now) and adapting it to the mesh I have.

Well, to works miracles, it’s still far from the effect I want to get but it’s a matter of tinkering with it.
Thanks a thousand Liero!

8

I tinkered with the script settings a little longer.

I have one question, is there a way to prolong the movement that comes from bounce setting? I love the motion that it produces but it gets dumped quite rapidly. On the other hand when I crank it up whole thing gets too wobbly so it would be great to be able to control life span in separation with amplitude.
Anyway, once again: awesome script, thank you so much!

9

that’s cool yazjack! see that bounce is hardcoded -it adds 3 extra keyframes- but you could go and modify script

also since yesterday! we have native easings with bounce, elastic and other interpolations in Blender’s f-curves, and it works nicely… you can try to combine it with the original curves -but use editor filter to work on rotations only-