Animation loops made with Little Stick and After Effects.

Little Stick is a neat little program that churns out 100+ species of trees, plants, and sea shells (?). Not much animation control, no keyframing and minimal options keep the program light and fast…, you just set the built-in camera to match the perspective of your scene, adjust the wind and sunlight with simple sliders, and then choose how long and what size to render your QT animation. That’s it!

Little Stick’s philosophy is that most CGI suffers from a bald lack of nature, but the learning curve for L-system modelers can be frustrating and slow. Little Stick provides seamlessly looping animations of trees blowing in the wind to composite directly into motion graphics, or use as an animated billboard in a 3D scene. It can help fill in a background or enhance an architectural rendering with life and motion.

There’s not much customization, but you can swap out your own bark and leaf textures, and hitting the make tree button randomizes the arrangement of branches without ever breaking the tree so even Grandma and little Suzy can plant a whole forest.

The built-in OpenGL renderer is fast but not terribly photorealistic, although at a distance and with some atmospherics they could be convincing. The wind motion is elegant and extremely smooth. Longer animations render slower movement, but again there is no keyframing so you can’t alter the wind’s course or velocity mid-flight.

Little Stick is not going to replace a robust 3D program with an environment system and hdr rendering, but you are making trees literally at the push of a button! Animations are rendered in minutes so there’s no need to keep a harddrive full of them, just render new trees as needed!

There’s even an option to export the animated model as a numbered series of OBJ files to use in your 3D app of choice! Not bad for such a low price, and combining a fool-proof modeler with a one-button renderer means most tree packages might have just become obsolete.