Making a convincing looking plant

[Hirazi Blue]

Well, the scripting tutorials (by Helge Mathee) published by 3D Tutorials were (and still are) "good stuff"! The language of choice for this DVD, however, is "JScript" as far as I can recall and in my opinion no one should be forced to learn more than one script language in their life-time, as I recently found out the hard way, whilst trying to code something in JScript instead of my native "Python"-tongue.
My advice: stick to what you already know!

A tiny, gentle (although, when I last checked, not entirely "bug-free")
introduction to Python and XSI/Softimage can be found in this pdf.

And strictly speaking, the line "Application.SelectObj("leaveme.Polygon*.pnt[0,4,9,58,69]" obviously is scripting code/syntax. You could however copy the string "leaveme.Polygon*.pnt[0,4,9,58,69]" and paste this into the "Object Selection Text Box" in the "Select Panel" to achieve the same effect... ;)

[shushens]

While doing this, I noticed a lot of edges have been created across the thickness of the leaves, which are, obviously, useless. So I executed this:

Application.SelectObj("leaveme.Polygon*.edge[19,21,26,28,41,43,47,49,58,61,63,66,69,71,90,93,95,98,101,103,117,118,120,124,126,131,133,134,136,138,142,144,149,151,172,174,176,180,182,187,189,190,192,194,198,200,203,205]")

and deleted those edges and triangle count jumped down from 108,000+ to a little below 65,000

So now I only had to select 0 and 4 from each leaf.

Then I selected those points and did a 'move centre to vertices'. But I am not sure what further pinning I should do. If I deform the leaves right now, the base points will still get out of place.

[Hirazi Blue]

After moving the centers to the "top" vertices, I created a new "neutral pose" and then "froze" all transforms. After that I pinned the leaves into place using the "Constrain > Pin Object into Position" command... ;)

[shushens]

I am really learning a lot from this thread! I skipped the neutral pose step (never thought of it because I never rigged anything in my life). So I was wondering... is there a different method for pinning points? LOL

Will try it again now.

__________________

Edit:

It still went... how you say... off the hook

[Hirazi Blue]

Hmm, must look into this...
Could have something to do with the axis (normal direction) you're trying to deform...

edit: I just checked it, you just shouldn't deform along one axis (the y axis),
deforming along the other axes works and the leaves stay in place (at least in my setup )