I have to animate the tree below to appear as if it growing... leafs will eventually fall off etc etc

does anyone have any links to some decent tutorials about that the best way to accomplish this? I've not done much with flash for about 4 years....

Do you mean it to vary if so a google on fractal ferns/trees should help.

robertpenner - nice movement tree levitated - fractal trees gskinner - 3d tree

but there are loads mostly old ones now, I am sure bit and arsis have stuff.

friends of ed have one in lots of books trawl through the downloadable files.

If you get stuck i can work something up.

thanks.... I have a bit of time before this needs building so I'll have a look at those and see if I can figure out the best way of doing it...

this is going to be fun I can can feel it :P

Looks like some good ol' timeline tweening to me. I would personally only automate the 'growing' / falling of the leaves and hand-animate the branches. Use some actionscript to control the sequence of animations, but use tweens on the timeline instead of creating everything in actionscript. Faster and better imho.

i agree some timeline tweening with code attaching can result in good results. leaves falling you can do with code though like flux said

There is a bunch of different approaches. The most appropriate choice comes down to how much control you want over the final result. Do you need it to be the same every time? do you want variance? motion etc?

If you are after something static then you're best bet is to animate it by hand using the time line.

If you are wanting something more dynamic then you will need to come up with a render strategy for the stems, one for the leaves and a class to manage the creation and connection of the elements. Consider breaking it down into smaller steps such as focusing on the branches then working on random distribution of leaves then the leaf render etc.

IMO you could do something really lovely in AS3 especially if you wanted to get some physics into it. http://www.snepo.com/experiments/Growth.html http://www.arseiam.com/fx/26.htm

Beautiful

_Originally posted by: Arsis_http://www.snepo.com/experiments/Growth.html

Good lord, arse, that is cool.

that is awesome.

SOme inspiration: ? maybe http://www.theunseenvideo.com/ http://www.depart.at/ http://www.flowersforhope.com/ http://www.rhythmoflines.co.uk/

Originally posted by: persist http://www.depart.at/

that shit rocks.

thanks very much for all the links.... some killer stuff.

I do need it to be the same each time I think.... or at least have a decent amount of control over it so it looks like hand animation is going to be the way to go....

flexes fingers

cries

well.... that was fun... here are the results http://www.petelonsdale.co.uk/files/tree.swf

that's a great animation! Well done, and quick too.

ta

it turned out well considering it had you in tears earlier. So did it give you incentive to take it further or is that as far as you're going with that sort of flash animation?

haha, maybe.... it certainly wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be....

we'll see