Process:
I don’t normally post demos to YouTube, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to animate blades of grass using dynamics simulation in Newtek’s Lightwave 3D – both cloth simulation and rigging gave unsatisfactory results & initially I had doubts about soft body dynamics as a solution.
It needs some tweaks but works in principal – you could use the same technique for animating foliage on trees and bushes, using weight maps to limit the effect of the simulation to selected parts of the geometry, e.g. trunks and branches could be made rigid compared to leaves.
The tutorial is really for loyal users of Lightwave and the same result can be achieved less painfully in software that has superseded it, like Blender, and would be a walk in the park for Maya users, I think.
You can view it on YouTube here :