First, Happy Spring! When the pussywillows pop out, it's spring in Alaska! ( Even if it snows again ). I went for a long run yesterday and collected a few examples to model. Question: I used Anything Grows on the buds, but ran into some trouble with assigning gravity and bend to get the "fur" to all go the same way. What i did was to make one bud, assign the ag fur, played with it to get it to grow to the tip of the bud, then duplicated it as a group (bud and AG hair). When I tried to assign the AG to each bud using the bud's shading domain, the AG went to the scene's alignment... Anyway, assigned as 1 model and grouped worked, then I grouped the stem to the buds/AGhair. Something funny happeded when I added a bone to the stem - it changed the AG hair to a vertex object and slowed everything down. Any ideas (other than using a shader instead of AG) to lower the polygon count and avoid changing the AG to a vertex object? I want to add bones to make changes in shape to the willows. Thanks. R

Never Give Up!