"[GDS|Entropy]" <gds### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Well its actually the difference of two very closely spaced cones, to
> produce a concave leaf. I am sure that even a single triangle would work,
> but I've never used them, ever, so am profoundly lost...more stuff that I
> need to learn. :-p

Triangles are not difficult... if you can write a climbing ivy macro I'm sure
you'll have no trouble. The main pig is that you can't use the regular
transforms on the individual triangles in a mesh, so you'll have to calculate
your triangle vertices the old-fashioned way; make use of vrotate() and
friends. After that, just treat a mesh as any other object. Don't worry about
mesh2 yet!

> Do you know of any simple files which would be a starting point?

You could take a look at Chambers' grass macro in the object collection,
although that's just a single loop to create many blades in one mesh (I think -
I just glanced over it).

Start small and simple, maybe with only hand-built clump meshes at first, till
you're comfortable with using triangles.

> Ok. I ran the macro on a a cyl column, just to see what you might be looking
> at.

Looks very good.

> It ended up taking 7min to parse with 90 vines and 15k moss object tests

That's quite long, but I guess finding the vine routes will always be quite
intensive. I once had a scene parse for over half an hour, so I wouldn't worry
too much... you could always save the positions to a data file if there's lots
of heavy calculation. :-)

Bill

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