Hi I was wondering if any of you could help me out on the best way of tackling something. I've recently started an MA in animation, after not really touching maya for 5years I'm kinda rusty.
I am modelling and animating some Henri Rousseau paintings. Some of it painted 2D and imported and some of it modelled in maya.
My idea was to model all of the plants and trees in Maya using EP Curves then loft them into planes and animate them.
I want all the plants in the scene to kinda move in unison, like a constant slow wave effect across the screen.
I was just wondering the best way to do this? My idea at the moment is to make a small skeleton for each plant,branch and leaf and skin the planes (nurbs planes?) to the skeleton and animate it - maybe using clusters and IK handles? though I don't have much experience in that...
I was toying with the idea of using soft bodies and blowing all the plants with an airfield, but in my tests I wasn't sucessful, or using cloth + wind? a possibility..
I have a intel quad 2.66ghz 4gb ram / geforce 280gtx and vista 64 running student maya 2009 unlimited, if you want an idea of my processing limitations.
Thank you very much for any help. I will post a picture of the image I am animating below, as you can see there's a lot of plants to animate - if you can help I will post some works in progress over the weeks if you're interested.
Bye!
Henri Rousseau - The Dream
