Now there's an easier way: Trees & Bolts. Simply add a Null object, load up Trees & Bolts, change a few parameters, add a few envelopes, and you have fully animated trees, bushes, or lightning!  

Trees and Bushes:
You can envelope every single parameter for trees that grow, blow in the wind, and stretch towards the sky. Trees & Bolts even includes 24 pre-made trees for you to use in your scenes. Need a quick palm tree? Load in one of the three included palm varieties. How about an office fichus? Or an oak, pine, or weeping willow? All there for you to load in, edit to your satisfaction, animate, and use.

Change the branch amount, size, angles, twigs, leaf shape, trunk twist and taper, and more. You can even set the quality of the tree for camera distance! Add roots, leaves, and bark.

Trees & Bolts has a real-time, OpenGL preview window that allows you to spin your trees all the way around to see what they look like from all sides.

So why spend hours modeling the perfect tree, and then days trying to animate it, when you can do it in minutes with Trees & Bolts?

Bolts (Lightning and Electricity):
Lightning has always been a staple of animators. What else looks cool enough to sizzle over your client's logo? It always adds a dramatic effect to scenes, but it's not the easiest to model and animate, and other lightning generators are limited in the capabilities.

With Trees & Bolts comes a whole new way of creating electrical effects! You can envelope every parameter, including branches, forking angles, height, spiral, erracticness, and more. The realtime, OpenGL preview window lets you see your lightning from all sides as you make changes to the parameters.

You can also set paths for the bolt to travel on! An unlimited number of endpoints may be chosen, or set your path to originate from polygons or vertices and to follow a motion path or the LW hierarchy.