Help modeling Ivy

[chiquito]

Hi, Im having a tough time modeling some ivy for some scenes. I attach a sample, samples have been made with a plug in Ivy Generator (http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/) my problem is that I need a lot of ivy, and to be able to play around with it. Ivy generator is excelent, but it builds up the size of the file.

My idea is to make some branches someway (its yet a mistery how...), just a renderable group of splines and fill them with scatter proxy objects, or any solution similar, Can any one give me a hint or point me as to model quick, low file size branches tutorials etc, alternative solutions welcome.

Thank you for any time and tips you could spend!

Martin aka Chiquito

[Tommy L]

I think youre making excellent headway, the forms re looking natural and organic. I would keep going with it in this direction. If the file gets too heavy, you could create a matte file for the ivy and just have the ivy and box information for the rest of the model. How much more area do you have to cover with ivy?

[batteryoperatedlettuce]

Thank you very much for providing a link to this piece of software. This is exactly what I was looking for.

 

You can always try putting an optimize modifier on the resulting objects if the poly count gets too high. He does mention in his FAQ on that web page that the meshes can reach a high count if you let the ivy grow for too long

[ipxstudios]

Thanks so much for the Ivy link and info. If you are using V-ray you might try converting the entire Ivy string into a proxy object. I'm going to try it.

[chiquito]

Good hints on the proxy object, really, what they want now is to make the ivy have a more tropical look to it, so I guess Ill end with a little piece of jungle. Its a farly big scene, with ivy al over it...That mesh is already rounding 40mb per section, there´s like 9 of them, I have alreday xrefered it... but I wish there was an easyer way to it...

[hughie]

Looks like a really nice bit of software, I'm looking forward to getting some time to play around with it.

one thing you could try is rather than grow an ivy all over a the mesh, look for places where the ivy can reoccur and Instance the proxy objects into those spots, you could loose some of the organic feel, but for bringing the file size down.....