Vegetation Simulation

After creating the snow simulation tests, I decided to work on the foliage simulation that we're planning to use near the train in shots 4 and 5. 

Sim created with pre-existing geometry

To create the simulation setup, I used the connectivity node to add a class attribute to each "leaf". I then got lucky and found out that each leaf is a ribbon. In order to extract a curve for simulation, I deleted half the points to create a curve that can be easily simulated using Vellum. When I went to deform the mesh with the extracted curves, I found that there were odd deformations. In order to fix this in the future, I think I'll average the position of the non-deleted points and the deleted points to generate a line that runs up the center of the ribbon. The simulation completed in less than a minute on a Macbook air. It would be possible to simulate each plant or simulate a library of plants that could be animated based on the proximity of the train to each plant.

Due to time constraints, my efforts have been redirected towards creating the snow simulation in shot 3.