I'm not too sure on this, but from my understanding it is not possible to do this convensingly. Paint Effects exist on curves and curves have limits. Your best bet would be to model the tree traditionally in nurbs, sub-divs, or (preferably) polygons. Depending on what you mean by woodcutter, I'm not sure how you would go about animating this. If you mean a chainsaw cutting the tree down, I would have the tree already split in two, then have the two separtate portions separate when the chain saw goes all the way through. If you're refering to those machines people use to shred limbs and stuff into mulch, gosh I'm not sure. The limbs would have to be animated because trees usually droop neat the tops when they are put in those things and sway back and forth. I'm guessing a complex skeleton would do the trick, but I'm not really sure how to do this effectively. If you're just looking for a simple animating that gets the point across though, just animate a polygonal tree going through it and let that be it. Hope this helps.