how can i create ivy?
3ds Max offers you several options if you want to create ivy. Some of the options include: Ivy Generator (free plug-in), scatter, particles, and Multiscatter (plug-in). Each of these options have their pros and cons, but all are worth checking out and incorporating into your arsenal of tools.
For instance, the Ivy Generator plug-in is great to use when you want a naturallooking growth pattern that respects adjacent geometry, but the natural growth is hard to control – just like in real life, it basically grows where it wants to.
Scatter is an all-round strong tool that can be used to populate vines with leaves, but once again lacks some control with regards to placement. Plus, you do not have the ability to scatter groups.
Much like scatter, you can use particles to populate your vines with leaves. Particles offer more control than scatter, by giving you the ability to place particles using a Distribution map, and particles can be instanced in groups. However, particles are somewhat visually intimidating and not very user friendly. The plug-in Multiscatter incorporates the best of scatter and particles into one tool, but can be costly to those on a tight budget.
For this tutorial, I will focus on using particles to create our ivy. More specifically, I will be using particles in order to instance leaves randomly onto some modelled vines. Generally, particles are associated with geometry such as water, snow or dust. Particles can not only distribute geometry into thin air, they can also distribute geometry onto other geometry. A basic particle source can be assigned any geometry to emit; it could be a snowflake or a leaf – you can control the emitted geometry. Also, you can constrain that emitted geometry onto any surface or geometry, which is what we will do for this example.
Here we are going to create a particle source, make it emit leaves, and constrain
those leaves to our modelled vines – creating ivy with random leaf distribution.
Before we begin, we will need some basic geometry. We will need a vine, or a network of vines, and a leaf. The vine can be a simple spline with rendering enabled. If the vine is in the distance, you may not see much once the leaves are attached. If your ivy is in the foreground, you may want more detail – this is totally your call.
The same goes for the leaf; the amount of detail you include should depend on the distance from the camera. For a simple leaf, create a polygon and add a nice leaf texture with an opacity map.