A free tool that will allow you to enrich your scenes with vegetation much faster.

Enriching your scene with vegetation is time-consuming, but there might be a faster way to do that. Thomas Luft has a nice free tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your scenes automatically. It is a fully procedural system that grows ivy from one single root following different forces: a primary growth direction (the weighted average of previous growth directions), a random influence, an adhesion force towards other objects, an up-vector imitating the phototropism of plants, and gravity.

A few months ago I was looking for a new sample scene to test watercolor renderings. I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation – like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.

Thomas Luft

This project is not about imitating biological principles, but rather about a simple way to get a nice-looking result that adapts to an existing scene. The ivy generator imports and exports obj+mtl files.

And here is a nice tutorial by ThePolaroidMONKEY to get you started:

Below you can find precompiled versions for Win32, MacOS, and Linux including the source code of this project under the GNU General Public Licence:

• Win32
• MacOSX
• Linux