Best way to make ivy?

cromadbomber

hi folks. I am currently making a post apocalyptic environment with lots of vegetation and all that crap so i was just wondering what would be the best approach to make ivy. First I tried to model some leaf shapes in Maya than duplicate them and arrange them into shapes but I always ended up with really ugly and non-natural forms. Also the second way I was thinking about is to find an Ivy texture ( cg textures) and cut out some leaves and arrange them into some shapes. What do you guys think what would be the best way to achieve good looking ivy and also if you could link me any tutorials I would be much appreaciated.

spacefrog

So you did not meet Thomas Luft's Ive generator then ?
http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/

Or the great 3ds Max plugin implementation of it ?
http://www.guruware.at/main/ivy/

Of course the latter would be of no use in Maya ...

cromadbomber

thank you so much spacefrog

Butthair

If this is not for games, then spacefrog is on spot. And you could even take renders of the Ivy you make to a texture for an in-game asset. If you want to populate the ivy in the game engine, assuming for game, then you'd want to make some variation types of little clusters, big clusters and long/short line trails of them.

There's a foliage page in the wiki too:
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironmentFoliage?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryEnvironment%5Cb%29

This way you can plop them all over the environment. But by all means, this meant only for games.