Moho Forum

How do you make a treeline that is receding into the background? For instance, while looking into a car head on, with the trees behind it giving the impression of movement?

It's a bit complicated, but basically you put trees on separate layers and assign each layer a different Z value. Then you move the camera (by Z values only), or put all trees into a group and move this relatively to the camera.

If it's only a short scene, I've found it's faster to just duplicate trees and edit Z values by hand, instead of painstakingly trying to create a loop of that setup.

Darn it, it's harder than it looks. This would be a good one for a video tutorial, or a script maybe, if that's possible.

It's just a bit of work, but not really complicated. I did an example in 5 minutes.

I start with one group layer, into which I put one tree layer. Multiply this combo many times, then change the Z value (cmd-M) of each group layer - from 1 to 20 in my case. Set the camera Z value (cmd-4) to 22 - you see the perspective now. For additional effect I flipped every other tree layer.

The reason why I work with group layers here is that I can easily add other artwork into each group, different trees, whatever. I keep that original tree in there for size and position reference. The nice thing is that you can keep a copy of this file as a master for future projects - just fill the group layers with whatever you need.

Us the orbit tool (cmd-9) for an overview of the setup.

Here's the file: http://slowtiger.de/examples/trees.anme.zip

Ah thanks for the fine example. I created a mock 'car' group and layer that was immune to camera movements and now I get it, I think short takes will work great, throw in other items like buildings in those layers you created, maybe hide a couple to break it up (like street corners). Thanks for getting me started, my poor head hurt trying to figure it out.

Wow! I needed this advice & this turned out to be a practical solution!

Thank you very much!