I have an ecosystem of Primroses, about 14,000, that I'd like to start off being bent over then rise up to normal like they are coming to life but not sure how to do that.

Can I use a function node somewhere for that?
I suppose I could render out some sequences then populate them as billboards.

Right now I'm just populating on a duplicate terrain and animating that height so
the flowers rise up vertcally but that's not as good as having them bend up into position.

I also tried converting the instances to objects, selecting all and trying to animate that way but my Ram gives out before I can complete the task.

If it's already been covered maybe someone could point me to a link.

Just some general ideas should help.
I'm using v6.5.
Thanks.

The easy way is to save one animated primrose as a vob and load that into the ecosystem.
To animate primrose: set end keyframe; then change properties such as droop, leaf size, etc and set first keyframe. Right click in object properties to save object and save as a vob. This won't create variation in the animation, to do that you would need to save out several different animations and add them all to the ecosystem.
Looks good I just tried it with ecosystem paint and 11,000+ primroses. No noticeable affect on system resources. David

Hey thanks. That seems to be working.

One odd thing though:
I preanimated them to open up over time, saved as vob's into my collection, added the collection, then in the material populated them as objects into the ecosystem.

That works, but strangly the animation is backwards. They start off normal then shrink and fold up over time.
I guess I'll have to preanimate them backwards and that should fix it. Strange though, ha.

I'm also just getting all red color so I suppose I'll need to save a few with different colors also.

It's workable though.

//edit:
DOHHH!
I pre-animated them backwards. So it 'is' working right after all. My bad.

Thanks again. :)