Animating falling leaves, feathers or papers falling in air

Hi all ! How would you tackle the task of animating paper money falling realistically. Air has an influence and the object needs to appear floating as it is falling…

Just like the feather at the beginning of forest gump movie.

I am not animator myself… Is there a way to animate that using some kind of physics simulation ?

Or would you go with keyframe animation (that is not really an option if there are a lot of them…)

Thank you !

You could set up a whole bunch of add force and gravity physics simulations in blender game (I’m not overly familiar with doing this). But physics simulations I’ve done so far, especially water, take “forever” to compute on my AMD 8 core. And your control over the animation is limited.

A simple animation like the feather would not be that many key frames unless you need it to do many radical movement’s and change direction frequently. I personally would go with a simple multiple floating bone armature setup with leaves assigned to each bone. You can “drag and drop” them fairly easy, then just select them all and apply a rot-location key frame.

If you need a “lot” of leaves, then looking at a physics simulation may be more manageable.

use particles, with particle display type set to ‘object’ and particle type set to ‘boids’, as well as force fields to blow them around.