[w i l l]

Ok, I'm a product designer and have only produced basic animations within Solidworks. However somebody wants me to model/render a hedge maze and animate a route of the camera moving through the maze. Do the architects on here have any advice on the best way to do this?

I.e. are there stock models of hedges, is there any modelling software that simply creates a hedge along a path (for eample I just draw a single path line in 2D and hedges are created along this path). Whats the best way to do this?

Stupid question but there is no way to animate straight out of Studio is there? (apart from Multilight)... I need to use the plugin with other software such as Maya right?

[Neil Evans]

Check out Dosch design, they have a landscape CD which has hedges. Not sure if it works with solidworks though.

[aitraaz]

Yeah you're gonna need a new host app to do the walkthrough, maya 3dmax, lightwave, c4d etc...

Dunno if you can find an app to draw hedges along splines, maybe you could come up with some small app, but its pretty likely you're gonna have to do that manually, either finding the right hedges (dload a model, easynat, xfrog, treestorm etc), and creating the labyrinth from scratch, then animate the camera for the walkthrough.

[michaelplogue]

I don't know if you're interested in getting new software, but I just got the pre-release version of Vue6, and it could do this very easily. With the eco-system, all you would need is a bitmap of your 'maze', and Vue would populate the paths automatically with whatever plant object you wanted to use.

An easy alternative would be to create simple 'blocks' of hedges using camphered boxes with Clipmapping for the leaves (I'd even use two or more boxes, one inside the other in order to create a feeling of layering for the leaves). Then, I'd just clone this along the splines - which I know can be done in Max, not sure about Solidworks though.

[Fernando Tella]

I've done some hedges in 3dsmax building simple boxes and scattering planes with clipmapped leaves onto them. I looked quite nice after some twicks. You can add a more opaque hedge clipped plane in the middle to make it more solid.

[ivox3]

Pretty simple to do out of rhino, ...but not using maxwell. How nice do these hedges have to look?

[w i l l]

Photoreal I think. I dont think I have the time scale and render power to do this at the moment. Thanks for all the tips though. Hopefully I'll get round to doing an animation at some point. I might get a mini render farm.