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I am a bit of a noob when it comes to animation but here goes.

I need to create a movie/video that has falling poppies and i need them to fall until the video stops, but I need them to fall on a transparent background because I will be projecting the video on to a mesh screen to overlay the brass band playing for a concert

Can anyone help? Thanks

Jack Moore
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1 Answers1

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What you want are particles. This will allow you to have may flowers falling, with minimal simulation overhead. The idea is you have the flowers on "cards" The cards are attached to the particles, and the particles physics replicate the falling.

Steps:

  1. Position you camea
  2. add a plane as wide as the camera in front of it.
  3. Move your flower object to layer 2 M
  4. Add a particle system to the plane, using the particle tab
  5. Particle setup:

enter image description here

Make sure all the circled settings match:

Set the Emit From to Faces, so it comes out of the face of the plane. Verts would have it come out of the corners, where the vertices are and volume would work very well since our plane has no volume.

I set the normal a bit higher to make the flowers a bit faster.

Rotation needs to be set to Velocity hair, so that the planes face the camera, you may have to edit the phase option to the left.

Set the render to Object this will make your particles appear as planes, like you desired. Set the dupli object to match your image of the flower. You can adjust the size to scale the flowers.

  1. Apply these materials to the picture of the flower:

enter image description here

In order to have the transparent background, we need to make a shadeless transparent material. The image will then add alpha back in later.

  1. For the texture use these settings:

enter image description here

Select alpha under influence, then set it to one. The will override the materials alpha.

  1. Render animation.

enter image description here
Note quality has been reduced by high gif compression, it will look fine when rendered

Demonstration:

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GiantCowFilms
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  • Down voting for hideous green squiggles, giant screenshots and a tutorial-like answer. Otherwise I suppose it answers the question :) Also what is "#109df0" in the first line? – Greg Zaal Feb 28 '15 at 10:53
  • @GregZaal I could write a fast and simple explanation, a non-tutorial answer at the top. I'm leaving the tutorial bit though since it is very helpful to users. Often if I don't add it with a question like this I get asked for steps, and end up doing it anyway – GiantCowFilms Feb 28 '15 at 15:06
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    @GregZaal I think your standards are way to high here. Yes they may have been ugly but served their purpose well enough to no warrant a down vote. Down votes are usually kept for wrong or really really poorly written answer that don't explain anything. – GiantCowFilms Feb 28 '15 at 15:31
  • Well I for one would never stoop to ugly green squiggles. I use ugly red squiggles . XD – ruckus Feb 28 '15 at 17:13
  • Edits are a much better improvement :) – Greg Zaal Feb 28 '15 at 20:22
  • @GregZaal Yes... aslo I have no idea how a hex value jumped of my clipboard there... – GiantCowFilms Feb 28 '15 at 20:25
  • mine are hexadecimal FF0004 – ruckus Mar 07 '15 at 02:24