Kenneth wrote:
> Jim Charter <jrc### [at] msncom> wrote:
> 
>>Kenneth wrote:
>>Excellent work, and a subject close to my own heart, so I can doubly
>>appreciate your efforts.
>>
>>Some test renders from one of my many wip's
> 
> 
> I keep looking at your vines with envious eyes. ;-)  Just the right
> combination of  "angularness" and "curviness." I also see that your vines
> sort of move slightly away from the tree surface here and there. Very nice.
> My own cylinders do that, but not in any planned way (some do travel
> across open space, but some also drill *through* the tree to get to their
> next points.) Your images give me inspiration to try and fix that.
> 
> Ken
> 
> 
> 
Thanks.  Yes that was some mind bending code to write for my feeble 
little mass of grey matter.  After seeing your efforts I went back to 
review what I done only to find that the sdl is all but incomprehensible.

Anyway, like you did, I presume, my basic idea was to generate some 
random path for any vine to follow using trace points on the tree 
surface.  The next trick, as you did too I am sure, was to utilize the 
trace function not only to locate contact points on the surface of the 
tree, but then to accumulate underlying vines into the trace target so 
that subsequent traces would find them too.  And I of course, found like 
you did, that the result looked like sprayed on silly string, when the 
vines clung too closely to the other vines.  So I implemented, I 
believe, a technique where I did traces over a certain interval and used 
only the "highest" points as the basis for a spline describing the 
overriding vine.  I could tune the interval and number of samples which 
gave the ability to have it follow the surface to a controllable degree 
(somewhat)  Put this together with the other elements in the macro, and 
the sdl becomes nearly unreadable.  For some insane reason I have all 
this scaling in there that is based on multiples of a base number which, 
I think, was the height of the tree trunk.

Anyway, the "vined" tree in that image was intended to lead to more 
ambitious things.  Based on my somewhat hasty entry in the POVCOMP I 
want to do more images in a similar vein but with much more elaborate 
backdrops of jungle and vines etc.  So I am following your efforts with 
great interest.  Perhaps I can find time this week to try and unravel my 
routine and make it more readable in case you may find something usable 
there, or something that leads to something usable.

While I usually use mesh to make stems and similar things along splines 
I see to my surprise that I actually used blobs in that code.

Post a reply to this message