Maya: Paintfx Tree Walkthrough

This is an introductory walkthrough of the PaintFX system as it relates to a tree. Once you know where to look and how to get started, PaintFX can be a powerful tool to allow you to populate a scene with a variety of foliage and other objects. The wealth of adjustments can be overwhelming, however I try to point out the ones most useful and how they impact the model. This is less of a tutorial and much more of a tour of the settings, however I feel this can be very useful information.

[@andrewbowman2497]

Appreciate the help, I'm part of a team of designers and I had to figure out terrain and foilage. Thank you for your videos and all the help they contain.

[@microbounce2009]

Very good video. Thank you very much.I will apply

[@nazmulamin3663]

This is great!

[@trevorpetersen9774]

When you are in the Particle Instance Options, where do the "Instindex", "Instscale", and "instRot" options come from? Are they custom parameters? If so, where do you make them?

[@VIPINFX]

XGEN and MASH All those Fancy Stuff Failed For Me but Now Old School Np helped.

[@ajk-s1e]

Hi thanks for tutorial, can you tellme plz what material did u use for tree leaves?

[@mohamarrawi7286]

How did you apply particles to the ground? i don't know how to instance

[@owosenidamilare7311]

great

[@rossdanielart]

Wish you had shown how to do the particle instancing with n particles as well

[@bortas2006]

Hey Ross, You select the surface and Emit nParticles from Object l guess you know how to fine tune the particles behavior and make them scatter, then with your objects (trees) and nParticles selected you create an instancer. To have all the objects randomly appear/ scatter when you play the animation you have to create a random instancers attribute in Per Particle(Array)Attribute, when you create this make sure you select the Atribute type Per particle(array), if you're not familiar with this just google how to Create an nParticle attribute. In Random instancer attribute Create an expression something like nParticleShape1.RandomInstancer = rand(0,7); then in the Instancer (Geometry replacement) check Allow All Data Types then in General Options - Object Index select Random instancer. So now when you play the animation you should have random objects being emitted... Let me know I could make a tutorial on this

[@anna-marieaims2193]

This was a great introductory video! Thank you so much. I have a question, what if I wanted to create a forrest that was swaying in the wind? If I want to take advantage of the seed and then if I just duplicate the object the history would be lost and you would no longer have the animation from the wind. Is there a way to use both?

[@altruizine]

Anna-Marie Aims you can bake out animation to a proxy or alembic. Wind can be difficult to model so that it looks right, it can pass over things in waves so your scattering may have to account for much more data regarding the geo.

[@anna-marieaims2193]

Thanks for the quick reply! Maybe I formulated it a bit clumsily: by animation I meant activating the Turbulence.
I just tried out duplicating the stroke, changing the seed and turning on Turbulence. I'm think of doing that for the entire forrest, however I have my doubts whether this is the most effective workflow? Do you have any recommendations?