Dealing with many small moving objects

Support Animation related help
1

I’m wondering if there are any shortcuts for dealing with lots of small objects. In Inkscape there is a duplicate tool that can randomize the inputs in a given range.

Imagine a tree with many leaves. Say I want to have them all float in the wind to the right. Could I use a degree/degrees of randomness rather than animating each leaf or copying flight patterns for each individual leaf

2

You can achieve that effect with a little of initial effort and just duplicating the layers.
First you need to achieve the movement of a single leave in a random way. It can be done by using the Link To Spline feature.

  1. Create a Outline layer
  2. For each tangent on the Spline, right click on the tangent’s handle and select Convert->Random.
  3. At the Parameters panel expand each tangent 1 converted to random subparameter and search for the Radius sub parameter. It is by default 1.0 I would set it to 2.0 to move the tangent a little more.
  4. For each vertex on the Spline, right click on the vertex subparameter at the Spline list at the Parameters panel (do it there because on the handle at the canvas won’t work).
  5. Once that the Spline is randomized, press play to check its shape along the time.
  6. Link to the Spline your leave.
  7. Animate the movement of the leave along the random Spline. This will give you the basis for the random movement of a single leave.
  8. Now comes the magic. Duplicate the Outline layer and its linked leave. This would give you one new random seed for all the random converted types so the Spline would be similar but completely random from the first. But the leave is still following the new random Spline as well as the first one so they looks like if the float together…

From here you can experiment with different animations of moving along the Spline, different speeds different initial values of the Spline (before convert to random) with more or less loops, change the color or sizes of the leaves… etc.

Attached is a simple example with to leaves.
-G

NOTE: Spline is the new name for BLine that will be changed at the wiki soon.
randomleaves.sifz (5.53 KB)

3

have done some little exemple (still using paste canvas / addition / random) … maybe have putted one usefulness intra rotation (encaps in pasted canvas)

work not to bad … (adjusting layer/actions/rotation/angle tcb can have best result)

see(:ya
leaf-animated.sifz (2.53 KB)

4

Thanks guys!