For this animation process I used key-frames, one at the start of the cycle as a small tree and one at the end when the tree has grown into a mature large tree. Obviously I knew I couldn't make it full grown and massive because trees grow to full size over hundreds of years. I'm only passing around 15 years so I didn't want the tree to grow to an unbelievable size, just large enough that we can see at least a decade has passed.
Growing the tree from it's initial size in the first key-frame was relatively simple, what was a challenge was gradually turning the tree into the into the tree in the 2nd key-frame, I found it a challenge to see how the branches would fit into place. In the end I felt molding the tree into the key-frame would be a far too complicated and time consuming process so in the end I decided to simply grow out the tree I was already animating and just try to make it around the same size and dimensions as the tree in the key-frame.
Small to large tree was animated in 9 frames. When I played it back I felt it flowed really well but it was a little to quick which made it look like the tree was growing far quicker than everything else. So to slow it down I added in-between frames to the sequence to extend it to a second in length. The results looked a lot better and to me it looked like it was growing at a much more realistic speed.
Small tree
Large tree
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