Making a field of flowers..

Hey! Wow it’s been so long since i posted here :stuck_out_tongue:
Probably cause i got a job and havn’t been able to do blender stuff for a while -.-"

Anyway…
My question today is that within the project i am working on, there is a large field of flowers.

These flowers need to do two things.

  1. At a precise moment, unravel into a different flower.
  2. change color at the feet of the people stepping through them (slowly infecting the flowers nearby); and eventually all change colors at once.

This may sound kind of strange and difficult, but i have the model of the flower, i have the shapekey to unravel it into another flower. And changing the color would be really simple aswell. (It’s very low poly)

My only problem i see is that i need an entire field of these. And i have learned in the past, alot of object Ids can cause large spikes of lag.

So i’m wondering is there a way to control alot of flowers like this perhaps through particles or maybe setting up a group (somehow i don’t know what groups do yet)

I know particles can have children that are basically copies of the main particle just scattered around it.
Can i do that with a model and have it follow the same animation changes as it’s parent?

I hope this makes sense x:

Thank you so much ^-^


Update, i’ve tried an Array modifier but it will only seem to duplicate the flower in one direction rather than in the general area (to my knowledge of how to use this)
But most importantly it appears that the space between the original object and the fake ones created by the modifier is based on the size of the object if it were a singlebox. Meaning that after the shapekey is applied and the flower changes and becomes a wider flower, the box is bigger, so the shapekey moves the arrayed flower’s position making it really unrealistic looking :frowning:

Alright alright. So as always i come to the forum to ask a question and find my answer before i get a response.
Funny how that works right? lol.

Anyway i forgot if there is a way to delete a post or not so i’ll just leave my answer here in case anyone else ever wonders this.

It’s not the greatest answer but what i think i will do is make a few duplicates of this flower… say 12 of them or so.
Give them all their own material

Then with the plain on the ground that is the field the flowers go in, i’ll assign vertex groups of the area where the people are standing, a bigger area around that.
And then slowly one concentric circle at a time, make layers outwards.

What i will do then is set up a particle hair effect and have each flower assigned to these different groups of vertex groups.
so as i control the main flowers out of sight, the ones in that specific area will take effect.

It may be kind of blocky but it’ll work for what i’m doing.