Hey,

Im trying to create an effect of growing vines and I keep re-evaluating my approach, so time for some critique:

In my effect I have two kinds of vines:

- thin vines that crawl on surfaces
- thick vines that grow through air and shatter the surfaces the encounter

They both have a starting point and a goal to grow towards.
They both create secondary sprouts but these only grow for a few frames and do not branch further (to keep it simple)

I'm trying to decide wether I should use a SOP or a POP:

Using a SOP I would create an hscrip that calculates where points are to be added and how these points are to be connected, then I would use this path to let my vine grow along.

The problem here is how to make sure that the thin vines stay on the surfaces they grow on (the environment will cosist of multiple nurbs patches….primuv???).

And how to trace when a thicker vine crosses a surface. - this should create a shatter effect.

My other aproach is to use a POP: I am not too familiar with POPS

Here my idea was to let an emitter follow a single particle with a scripted velocity on so that it moved towards the goal - also this emitter would put down particles wihout any speed and then I could use these to generate my path with. With this method I would be able to let the particles collide with geometry - and I would not have to worry about that part of the code.

The problem with this way is that it would be tough to generate the sprouts …

I hope someone is willing to read all this and give some kind of input…any help would be deeply appreciated.