Hello

I have a really big fairy tale like tree that I sculpted in mudbox so I want to put leafs and some additional tiny branches on it.

I know that I can make leaves as planes but I want to put leaves on branches and animate them.The tree is kind of enchanted live tree and it has to move a lot.

How to animate branches and get a realistic leaf movement???

I’ve seen a few really high end jobs use paint FX to do a nice job of the smaller branches of a modelled tree.
You can use modify>paintFX to polygons to give you polygon geometry you can shade with your own shaders and textures.
widows>general editors>visor for paint fx presets. Try the treesMesh presets andsee if you can modify one to give you a nice looking branch you can parent into your model.
You can either shape the leaf mesh to be more or less leaf shaped or use a transparency mapped leaf texture to give you a nice specific leaf. This might be a bit heavier in the render.
Remember to think about texturing your leaf shader’s translucency.
Not sure, ray traced “segment shadows” might help give nicer lighting in Mental Ray.
There is some really nice fake dynamic animation stuff you can do with paint FX. Look in the bottom end of the brushes attribute editor>Tubes>behaviour>Turbulence.
I’d suggest you use turbulence type: World Force as this should give continuity between the forces on your different branches.
One rather nice feature is that even instanced strokes interpret the world force turbulence differently in different positions, so therefore look less identical. This does not work if you instance after doing paintFX to Polygon.
Both these ads use paint FX, I was told.

http://www.framestore.com/#/Commercials London/JohnnieWalker,Tree
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rkvUEtbM1w