Ivy foliage on real time project ? technics ?

Alecc

Hey guys,

I need to add Ivy foliage on my environment.
I tried Ivy generator ( Guruwave ) and it's very, very cool, but it's too heavy in polygon ( 250 000 poly for just one ivy part )

So just a question : Ivy generator can be used in Real time project ? 
if yes, how to reduce the polycount ?

If no, what alternative you know to have a nice ivy effect ?

Thank,

A.

HAWK12HT

uh I use ivy generator in my projects for mobile or pc does not matter, you have to bake that generated ivy on plane / card geo (hi lo workflow) simple. Generally what I find easy is to generate ivy on plane with variations get alpha / texture out of it and apply on my foliage mesh.

Eric Chadwick

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Foliage#3ds_Max

Alecc

HAWK12HT said:

uh I use ivy generator in my projects for mobile or pc does not matter, you have to bake that generated ivy on plane / card geo (hi lo workflow) simple. Generally what I find easy is to generate ivy on plane with variations get alpha / texture out of it and apply on my foliage mesh.

Hum interesting, can you develop yor workflow ?

How you handle the bake ? the ivy generation is "chaotic", how do you adapte a simple geometry on this ? and how do you get back an alpha ? ( I can understand for the bake, but what about the alpha map ? )

If you have an example or youtube tutorial, link it please

Obscura

If you have polygonal leaves, you can apply white material to the foliage, and put a black background behind them, like a plane mesh for example. And then you could bake a color map from that, which would be your alpha map at the end. 

You could also spit the ivy into smaller parts and bake them separately to get more precise result, or if you want many planes as low poly. But then I would rather try to make a few branches and use them in a modular way.

shabba

I've never used Ivy Generator, but if it is giving you a hi-res mesh of vines with leaves, you could do what @Obscura said and bake them down into something that is workable to create a low res mesh from. If you didnt make high poly leaves, and just mapped leaves to cards /w alpha, then you wont be able to use RenderToTexture - but this method (old) still works for rendering out alpha. Just takes more time to set up.

http://www.bencloward.com/tutorials_normal_maps11.shtml

Try to think and plan out the best shapes that will allow you to have an efficient texture layout, while maximizing the variety of shapes you can create.

Personally I still like to work with Speedtree even when creating vines/ivy for all my high/low/texture baking needs. And then comp them together into a texture.