An Ivy Generator. by Thomas Luft

An Ivy Generator. by Thomas Luft

A few months ago I was looking for a new scene to test my watercolor renderings. I thought about something complex, filled with vegetation - like trees overgrown with ivy. Luckily, I was able to implement a procedural system to make the ivy grow on its own. The result is a small tool that allows virtual ivy to grow in your 3D world.

Ivy grows from a single root under the influence of various forces: the primary direction of growth, random influence, the force of adhesion to other objects, the upward vector, which mimics the phototropy of plants, and, finally, the force of gravity. This simple diagram shows that the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of ivy growth, but a simple approach to creating complex and realistic vegetation that adapts to the existing scene. Ivy generator import and export obj+mtl files.

Here are the precompiled versions for Win32, MacOS and Linux, including the source code for this project under the GNU General Public License. Porting for MacOS was kindly done by Robert Templeton (Kuroyume development area). Linux port courtesy of Ruben Lopez.

Archives

ivy_generator_Win32_1.3.rar

ivy_generator_MacOSX_1.3.zip

ivy_generator_Linux_qt4_1.3.tar.gz

Previous issues and additional materials can be found on the official website of the project: http://ivy-generator.com/