Animated pine seed blowing in the wind.

Animated pine seed blowing in the wind.

Hi,
I'm really new to this, but this is what I'm trying to do. I want to create an animation of a pine seedling being blown on the wind, and these are the steps I have managed so far.
* Photographed a real winged pine seedling and successfully imported it as a material into my Cheetah file.
* Successfully placed this onto my polygon object (plane). Animated this successfully except - of course - the camera light keeps illuminating the polygon as well as the seed. Can I get the seedling to be visible but not the polygon object it's sitting on?
* I've also tried creating a spline object - filling it in with a polyplane, and then trying to place my seed texture onto this so that I can tweek the object to the exact shape of the seedling - but everytime I try to drag my texture onto the spline my polyplane disappears and I'm left with an empty spline objrecct again.

If anyone can help me achieve an "animatable" winged seedling from my photograph I'd be really grateful.

Keeping my fingers crossed - Martin

I would assume that if you created an alpha channel in your image the problem would go away.

But, the best option would be to model the seedling in 3d -- then it could actually spin around.

I'm not sure what your seedling looks like but in general the geometries of this kind of seed ( http://waynesword.palomar.edu/plfeb99.htm ) don't seem too complex, so a little subdiv modeling would get you a long way. You could then build a texture using your photos and get very nice results.