Tool for generating ivy around a given piece of geometry. The implementation is based-off Virtual climbing plants competing for space by Bedřich Beneš (2002). Written for an industry masterclass using Fabric Engine. This should grant us DCC-agnosticism out-of-the-box, but the GUI is only compatible with Maya.

• Fabric Engine: 1.13.0
• Maya: 2014

Simply clone the repo and add the ext directory to the FABRIC_EXTS_PATH environment variable.

Copy the files from inside the maya directory to your maya/<VERSION>-x64/scripts folder and set up a shelf button to open the GUI to the Fabric Splice node (an icon is provided in the images directory). Add the following Python code to the shelf button:

import FabricVegetation
FabricVegetation.FVegetationUI()

Various options in the GUI are explained in the following list. These values are also referenced in the documentation although under slightly different names.

• Distribution angle: Conical angle within which the bud may grow at each step.
• Distribution samples: Number of random positions the bud will evaluate against at each step. The higher the value, the more accurate the growth.
• Bud chance: Chance for an inactive lateral bud to grow along a branch for traumatic reiteration-sakes.
• Bud active chance: Chance for an inactive bud to activate upon being created, so as to achieve branching.
• Leaf chance: Chance for a leaf to be created at each step, per-branch.
• Min increment size: Minimum distance each active bud has to grow per-step.
• Max increment size: Maximum distance each active bud can grow per-step.
• Increment steps: Number of iterations of growth to simulate.
• Max thickness: Maximum radius of the branching.
• Leaf size: Size of each plane geometry for the leaves.
• Quadratic falloff lights: Whether the lights should have a quadratic falloff or not (does not work too well at the moment).

• The GUI is quite rudimentary, it was done quickly and dirtily with Maya GUI commands.
• Sunlight does not work entirely as expected.
• The "clear seeds" and "clear lights" buttons disconnect all seeds and lights, but do not clean the fabricVegetation node's multi-array indices. This causes any new seeds/lights to have a bad naming convention and incorrect connections.
• The leaves are generally in the correct direction, but there are cases where they may seem to be less random than desired, i.e. on a large flat surface, the sizes also need to be randomized.
• There are occasional collisions with the environment geometry and the vegetation itself.
• Leaves do not have psuedo-collision detection like the ivy.
• When there are no lights in the scene there is a strange bug that makes the vine grow wildly, nearly disregarding the environment geometry.

Benes, B. and Millan, E. (2002). Virtual climbing plants competing for space. Proceedings of Computer Animation 2002 (CA 2002).