Modeling question

Reverenddevil

Hey does anyone know the best solution for getting a vine or object to wrap around another object. Let me give you an example.

Say I want a vine to wrap around a pillar, going up and down it. What are some ways people have done this? Would you just take a cylinder and start manualy moving verts around, or could you path deform?
The way I attempted it was to take a spring object, lower the turns etc and move some of the verts. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

Slum

Your best choice for this is probably the path deform WSM.

Reverenddevil

Ok, now my other issue. When I create a spline, how do I get it to move in different axis in 3d space. When I create a spline it is always just laying on the ground and I cannot create it in y or z space it is always flat. Thanks.

Archanex

convert it to an editable spline, then you'll be able to move the verts in any axis you want

Reverenddevil

Ya, that is what I do. I was just wondering if there was a way while i create the spline of clickign where I want ti etc.. Thanks.

sprunghunt

If your pillar has enough verts you can just turn on 'snap to vertex' and when you create new path points they'll automatically snap to the surface of the pillar.

That's how I made the vines on this stuff:

Mark Dygert

Why not make it easy?

http://www.neilblevins.com/soulburnscripts/soulburnscripts.htm
Neil Blevins (soulburn) has an awesome spline painting script. You basically pick an object and paint a spline on it. Super great to do things like this.

http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/
You can also play around with the Ivy Generator and turn the # of leaves to a really low number. It's a stand alone app but pretty cool. Once you know about it, you see TONS of crappy environments with great looking Ivy, heh. It creates pretty high poly meshes too, which is fine if you're baking it.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=4551973&postcount=73
There's also a 3dsmax script that grows splines like the IVY Generator, but its still a work in progress.