Hello guys. This little article here is about a great 3ds plugin from Guruware called GwIvy . It’s actually pretty easy to use, a its settings are mostly explained on the Guruware website, so i will be only focusing on creating some custom plants with it.

What you see on the images above is a simple box with some plants on it. All of this was created with GwIvy. And how? Well, lets look into that.

First of all i’ve created some geometries tha i’ll want on our gwivy. We have a leaf and a flower. Please do remembrer that the more polygons will your flowers have, the harder it will be to work with them, as GwIvy takes loads of ram memory for such creation process, so in the end it is better to created more smaller gwivy sources, then to work with one big one.

After creating our geometry we have to, and this is a very important part, set the pivots of our flowers. This is important because our flowers will be attached to the GwIvy branches exactly by those pivot points, so if you won’t set them right you might end up with some pretty weird plants.

This is were i’ve set my pivot:

Now please notice that although the flowers on the render are hanging down in here they are pointing up with the pivot set at the bottom of the geometry. It’s because i forgot to rotate the pivot and its Z axis is pointing down.

To change/move the pivot you have to go to the Hierarchy panel in 3ds Command Panel:

Ok, now lets create our main GwIvy branch. I won’t be explaining all the settings, as all of this can be found on Guruware website , i’ll just show you my settings.

I’ve placed this GwIvy source on the top of my box with the settings below:

and pressed “Grow Ivy” until i was satisfied with the effect:

As you can see above i’ve set the leaf density to be a bit lower, so that my PC won’t freeze after adding the geometry every time i’ll need to change something. That is due to the massive ram usage i’ve mentioned before.

The next step is to replace our standard GwIvy leafes with our custom geometry. To do this we just select the first position in GwIvy Leaf Meshes section and select our previously created flowers/leafs:

I’ve also created a new GwIvy for the leafs like the one above, just with higher density:

IMPORTANT! GwIvy takes up a lot of ram memory, for the creation process and for rendering. It is good to work with it on a “better then average” PC. Also after creating GwIvy it is good to export it to proxy to save some memory while rendering.

I hope that this will be helpful. Have fun!

S.

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