"[GDS|Entropy]" <gds### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> They seem tedious more than difficult....I hate tedium.

It's no different from looping to place compound objects; you write macros to do
the work for you. To be sure, it requires a bit of concentration to get to the
first stage, but once you've got something that renders it's just tweaking. It
can be helpful to draw diagrams to aid with the visualisation.

Use plain mesh (i.e., just triangle statements) - it's much easier than mesh2.
(To be honest, mesh2 is mainly a handy conversion format for speeding up
parsing, you only need to use it if you're generating 10000s of triangles.
They're both the same thing once parsing is complete).

> I'll take a look at that there, and given that those are blades of grass,
> its probably not too far off from what I want to do with moss leaves anyway,
> I'd just need to grab one blade.

I've been trying to write a decent plant include file for a while now. I've got
a leaf macro that builds different shaped leaves procedurally, and I'm slowly
adding types of plants to use it. It's a long-term work in progress, but I've
got grass and dandelions so far. No ivy leaves yet, though. I can post the leaf
macro later if you're interested...?

> Suprisingly, its not the vine routes that takes the time, its tracing the
> moss onto the individual vine components.

Write random locations on the vine routes to a data file as you go, then read
them back in when you place the moss? Or the same thing, but using an array?
Every time you make a vine section, #if rand(seed) < probability then store the
current endpoint, or something.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, I'm sure you've got it in hand... :)

Bill

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