Little Stick is a Mac-only software title developed by a small British company. What it does is to let users create 3D movies / snapshots of dynamic tree movements. Personally, I thought at first that this Mac software title didn’t quite impress me. But you will be surprised to see how minutely the tree is depicted after you export a project to a QuickTime movie.
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To begin with, you need to select a tree type under a top pull-down menu. As shown in Screenshot 01, Little Stick comes with Dawn Redwood, European Larch, Japanese Larch, Swamp Cypress, … The list goes on and on. How many tree types are included? The full version comes with at least 94 tree types. If you go to Real Trees A-Z, you can find one that you want in the alphabetical order. (See Screenshot 02.)
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There are several factors that will change the look of the tree. One is tree’s age. The age pull-down menu includes Sapling, Child, Adolescent, Adult, Ancestor and Dead. (See Screenshot 03.) As shown in Screenshot 04, another important factor is Season. For example, if I choose Winter, the tree will lose all leaves. (See Screenshot 05.)
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An important feature of Little Stick is wind. Little Stick will allow you to change wind speed, direction and height. If I move the wind speed slider to the right, I won’t really see much change at a glance. (See Screenshot 06-7.) But I will notice the difference if I render a preview movie because wind will blow the tree one side to another more fiercely.
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Screenshot 08 is a close-up snapshot of a tree that I was working on. The bark doesn’t contain much detail, does it? What I can do to make it more real is to import a photo of a real tree. As shown in Screenshot 09, I got one. Let me use Adobe Fireworks to rotate it and make a small square selection. (See Screenshot 10-1.) After saving it as a PNG file as shown in Screenshot 12, I can import this file to Little Stick by clicking on the Wood button. (See Screenshot 13-4.)
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Another nice feature of Little Stick is that it will let you pan, rotate and zoom around the 3D environment. For example, the first button shown at the bottom allows me to zoom in and out and change the 3D view. (See Screenshot 15-7.) The second button from the left will let you pan the camera right and left, up and down. The second button from the right is a rotation button, and the tree will rotate along X, Y and Z axes.
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All right. As shown in Screenshot 18, I’ve finished changing settings. Now, I want to preview my work. I can do so by simply moving the slider at the bottom of the View window right to left. Or I can just click on the play button to render a preview movie. Before doing so, I need to specify the animation length and the frame rate. As shown in Screenshot 19, I’ve entered 10 and 24 to make a 10-second movie with a frame rate of 24.
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So how long will it take Little Stick to render a preview movie? My tree has a lot of branches and leaves. So it took about 8 minutes and 5 seconds. If you have less branches, it will take less. When the rendering process is over, Little Stick will open a preview movie window. (See Screenshot 20.)
So if I’m satisfied with the preview result, then what? I can export one frame at a time as a graphic file. For example, as shown in Screenshot 21-2, I exported one frame as a TIFF file with alpha transparency.
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Another choice that I have is to export a project to a QuickTime movie. As shown in Screenshot 23, first, I need to choose Save Movie under File. If I want to use a tree clip as part of a larger movie, I can use Animation as a video compressor to have a separate alpha channel. (See Screenshot 24.)
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By the way, once you close the preview movie window, you won’t find it under Window any more. (See Screenshot 25-6.) You can instantly bring it back by clicking on the play button again as long as you haven’t changed a single setting. If you change even one setting, you have to render a preview movie once again before exporting a project to QuickTime.
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There is nothing negative to say about Little Stick. One complaint might be that rendering takes more time than I had initially expected. A faster rendering engine will be nice. It would also be nice if Little Stick supported an audio function such that you could embed an audio file and export a movie with it. That would be a wish for those who don’t use heavy movie applications such as Apple’s Motion, Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects.
Before writing this software review, we asked the software developer what group of people is using this software title. He said
People who have bought Little Stick include, illustrators, cartoonists, 3D artists, architects and even a Video DJ for live mpeg mixing in Dutch nightclubs. He managed to get various plants dancing in time to the music.
Little Stick is a product of Fenwick Cooper.
A screenshot of woods used here comes from PD Photo (http://pdphoto.org/).
Note: It is not our best interest in making fine samples by spending hours or days.
Sample QuickTime movies
Click on the button to watch a sample (raw movie). 
Click on the button to watch a sample (audio with background).
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