Chandan Kumar shows how to create and animate a birch tree in Autodesk Maya using Maya’s Artisan engine and Paint Effects walking through the process from the designing stage, to texturing and shading, animating and rendering a birch tree inside of Maya.

what was once considered to be an extremely difficult, time consuming task, has been made considerably easier with advances in modeling tools such as Maya’s Paint Effects

Working off a standard birch tree Paint Effect Preset in Maya, Chandan makes alterations to the tree and its textures, and then animates some of the Paint Effects’ attributes. CHeck out the tutorial for Designing and Animating a Birch Tree in Maya using Paint Effects here.

Paint Effects has been around for a long long time, and it might be showing its wear, and certainly, nothing looks “fantastic” straight off when using a paint effects stroke, however, with some tweeking it has been show that you can get some absolutely amazing effects by using paint effects and some elbow grease.