"Bill Pragnell" <bil### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> That is truly excellent. Very realistic. I agree that the vines look a
> little too angular near the base, but I think they look fine further up.
> Did you make the leaves yourself too?
>

Yes, as a single sPatch model, painted with a (rather simplified) Photoshop
artwork overlay, based on some photos I took.  Luckily for me, right
outside my apartment window is a gigantic old gnarly tree, practically
engulphed in ivy half-way up its trunk. So I had daily inspiration!

> The straight-line approach... perhaps you could join the cylinders with
> torus segments?

A very neat idea, I'll have to try that.  At one point, I was considering
using half a torus to try and recreate where vines actually cross over each
other... the "bump."  But I concluded it would have involved a rather major
re-write of my tracing code...at the very least!
>
> Just out of interest, what sort of parse time vs render time are you looking
> at?

I should have made a note of that, but didn't. Total render time (using
cylinders for vines) was between 3 and 4 hours on my 400MHZ  Pentium II,
using AA 0.2.  Parse time was a small fraction of that--perhaps 5-to-10
minutes at most. I actually aborted the sphere_sweep render about half-way
through! But I'll run that version again and report back (the code is still
intact.)


Ken

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