I started working on a procedural Ivy Tool for Film VFX purposes. I looked into available resources to begin this journey and find theProject Titan Ivy Tool [www.sidefx.com]which seems like a really good. I was following the principles for their pipeline but started adding my own elements. There is a few differences I want to tackle as I progress further with this project:
Create Procedural Materials for both the Ivy and Leaves, Flowers.
Create proper Growth animation, with Leaves and Flowers Blooming.
Optional Goal: Export it as a tool for usage in Maya.
Subtasks I'm working on:
Finding a way to merge the different sources of base ivy mesh to have it prepared for the growth.
Create the growth control for the ivy with one attribute.
Add procedural flower generation.
Tweak Leaf generation to have more detail (currently placeholder).
Leaf and Flower bloom control with separated rigs.
Create material for Ivy (MaterialX).
Create material for leaves and flower (MaterialX).
Any experience or critique is more than welcome regarding this project. Both for the generation of the meshes and the materials itself. I will keep updating this thread as I progress with the project hopefully until completion.
I hope you share this when its done A tool like this is very useful!
First I would swap the placeholder of the leaf for an almost final version, so you can actually evaluate what the outcome is. Looking at references show that ivy grows so differently every time. So it would be nice to have control over the density of the leaves ("bushiness"). I am not sure how this is handled in the tool you are referencing but it might be cool, if you only have to draw 1-3 curves and the other branches get created procedurally.
A tool like this is very useful!
