Moho Forum

I would like to be able to draw a plant in its growing cycle or a flower opening. What is the best practice for achieving this. I've tried drawing down the timeline but, the vector points keep moving on me and the drawing gets all messed up.
Thank you for your insight.

You'll start with the plant in full bloom, then work backwards from it. Create your plant, copy its keys to frame 1 and frame 100 (you can adjust timing later), then point animate the plant in frame 0.

Thank you for your reply Slowtiger, But I don't understand your answer. If it's not to much trouble could you be a little more specific. Thank you.

he means start from your final open/bloomed flower - then animate it closing in on itself.

Put the blooming bud in its own layer and animate the blooming without the vertical movement first to keep it easy - then animate the layer position and rotation to make it stick to the top of the stem.

The stem growing can be done using stroke exposure - and doing this is a good way to judge your timing and easing - its very quick and easy to tweak and therefore time so do that first as you might decide that the bloom itself only needs to be over the course of 12 frames which'll save you a lot of work than doing a super detailed slow-mo bloom that takes 3 minutes to open when in fact it just needs to pop open very quickly - it depends on your requirements.

Another helpful thing would be to search for video source of flowers blooming and pick one that has roughly the timing and look that you want - the way it opens might be complex to imagine but not too difficult to 'represent' if researched.

Thank you so much, that's very helpful.

this from a while ago: .
it's not a flower - just a seedling, but it's point animation and is based on the "reverse" technique SlowTiger described... what I did here is: frame 0 draw the open state all on one vector layer and make that a vector layer in a switch; copy that vector layer and move all the points to the initial state (small folded up); then animate with a "smooth interpolate"... when that doesn't do what you want copy the frame 0 vector to make a new layer and move points to make an intermediate position etc.. that way I had very clear "checkpoints" and I could vary the timing and detail of transitions for different seedlings (e.g. Seed1 uses the "folded", intermediate 1, "open" stages; but Seed2 uses "folded", intermediate 2, "open"; and seed3 uses "folded", intermediate 1, intermediate 2, "open"; ...etc) There are "leaves within leaves" (shape stacking order) that match the need for "petal within petal" of a bud.