Page 1 of 1

Amber waves of grain?

Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2018 3:47 pm
by cabbage0896
I'm trying to come up with a way to draw a field of wheat blowing in the wind, does anyone have any ideas? I've tried the grass particle with longer brown vector layers and the color is right but that particle setup (source width) puts everything in a straight line. I'm looking for something more organic and natural looking. I even tried stacking many particles on top of each other but still to structured and and it froze up my machine. "Amber waves of grain" is what I'm going for, Any thoughts on a simple way to do this? C

Re: Amber waves of grain?

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 2:46 pm
by hayasidist
something like this?

Re: Amber waves of grain?

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 3:27 pm
by slowtiger
Have a look at this: https://twitter.com/Vulpes_No9/status/9 ... 9898067968

Simple and elegant.

Re: Amber waves of grain?

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 5:47 pm
by Greenlaw
Years ago, I had to create a field of sunflowers for a car commercial and I didn't have much time.

What made the shot complicated was that it was taken with a drone camera flying next to the car. At first, I tried tracking the scene and and inserting many 3D instances of sunflowers but it was impossible to make the sunflowers over great distances. What I wound up doing is creating a panorama of the environment by selecting key frames from the live action footage and turning that into a static matte painting with the sunflowers composited over it, then dropping that into my 3D scene. that solved the tracking problem.

Stay tuned: the next problem is more related to the waving grain challenge.

The director wanted the sunflowers to wave credibly in the scene but the matte painting was 2D and static. To create the waving flowwers, I masked off regions from farthest to nearest and ran a fractal displacement through the regions. The only area in the image with any 'real' 3D sunflowers was the closest row near the car. I dropped that 'animated' matte painting into the scene, and was done. It looked convincing enough. It didn't matter the flowers were all part of a single static image and not moving individually...the eye wants to see 'waves' so displacing the image with a large wave pattern was all that was needed. In individual flowers in the foreground was just there to sell the background stuff, and that layer was so motion blurred and moving by so quickly, you really couldn't see them animating anyway.

Anyway, if you have a compositing program like AE or Fusion, the waving trick is pretty easy to do with displacement or using Liquify in AE. By carefully masking zones by depth and using appropriately scaled fractal patterns, it's not difficult to make a credible wind effect over terrain.

If all you have it Moho, you can do something similar use Mesh Warping on a pre-rendered image of the field. Separate the most distant part of the image (sky, mountains, terrain with no wheat,) and use the Magnet tool to animate the Mesh. It will be a little trickier to do in Moho but it's doable. Then, as in the above example, you can animate individual wheat stalks in the foreground using looping bones animations or particles. To make it easier, use references and offset the references with Sequencer. (I've done this last part for underwater plants in a couple of shows...works great!)

Hope this gives you some ideas to try.