New version of WeightLifter introduces baking and animation

A new version of WeightLifter is available on BlenderMarket.

WeightLifter is an add-on that can calculate all sorts of information and store this into vertex groups or vertex color layers. It can for example determine the visibility of vertices for a certain camera or the distance to some light source and much more, information that can for example be used as a density map in particle systems.

New features

The newest version introduces some new modes like calculating a flow map or the mesh deformation but the most exiting new feature is the ability to bake any weight map for each frame in an animation. This way can quickly regenerate a vertex group for each frame while rendering, effectively animating a weight map, something which is not possible otherwise.

To illustrate how to do this, I have created a short video that shows the workflow for creating an animated density map that lets the proximity to a lamp drive the emission of particles.

Further Space Tree Pro animation experiments

The trees you create may look alright but they are fairly static. To add realism animated leaves and a swaying trunk skeleton might help.

Therefore I am currently investigating which simple animation techniques could be used. The goal here is to add some life to scenes like architectural fly through, so low wind scenarios is what we aim for.

The general idea is to animate the trunk and branches (and the separate mesh that acts as a leaf emitter) by an armature consisting of just a few bones. The leaves are subsequently animated by adding an extra wave modifier to the leaf emitter that moves the point where a leaf is attached slightly. Additionally we animate the phase of the rotation of the leaf particles slightly.

The overall effect should be a slight swaying motion with some additional movement of the individual leaves. The first result is shown below

i think it would look better with more movement for the individual leaves.

Now the swaying movement itself is still a bit much: larger trees actually need quite some wind before the main trunk starts to move, the outer branches however are much more flexible and bend in low winds for all sizes of trees.

This seems to be be the right balance between sway and leaf movement.

When these experiments are finalised the idea is to add an option to Space Tree Pro to enable all these modifiers and additional settings by simply checking a box. And of course we'll make sure that each tree will get slightly different values so that an animated street full of trees will look as if it is performing some weird choreography.