"Thickness" to leaves

[mbe]

Hi!

Need to make some desert plants and started today with a Agave.

I'm not a pro with GrowFX yet and maybe I'm starting at a wrong point.

Good news, I got the leaf shape I need and will start over with three distributers. One for the ground leaves, middle parts and upper one which bends to the top. So it is not going too bad. But I stumbled onto some problems.

 

Bad news are, I need some thickness on my leaves. This nice shape I made but with full geometry.

Is this possible? I played around with cylindrical mesh but had no good looking results and wasn't even able to match the shape.

Also tried to add a full custom modelled leaf but it didn't work.

 

Some Agave plants have little spikes at the leaves. How can I do them?

And finally: The leaves which are interescting each other need to be removed/adjusted later manually I guess? No "collision control" or something like that?

 

If it is not possible I may get off with alphas because I need to optimize for real-time application a bit.

But if I can solve the spikes and mesh problems I may be able to do nice cactus with same method too.

[mithcd]

While waiting for an answer from an admin, you might want to look at this conversation.

 

http://exlevel.com/forum/index.php?/topic/233-add-the-option-for-leaf-thickness/?hl=leaves

[mbe]

Ah okay. Then I assume it is not possible 8at the moment).

I guess I will use the shape from the leaf then, turn into geometry and add a shell-modifier with some manual twekaing to get the job done.

[ajroane]

@mbe - There are three parts to creating a thick, succulent-type plant.

First, you have to model the leaves, outside of GrowFX. It would be very difficult, if not impossible to get the right geometry for this type of leaf using only GrowFX parameters/modifiers. For my agave, I started with a 3dsMax plane object, then poly-modeled the flat shape of the leaf. Then I copied that element, offset it a bit, and welded only the edges together. Then I started pushing and pulling vertices to get the right thickness in the leaf. This step requires a lot of tweaking.

Second, create the spline structure for the plant using GrowFX. You're right, this part can be a bit tricky for a plant like this, since leaf intersections will make the plant look odd. You can always do a bit of manual editing of leaf placement after you convert to a mesh. That is what I did.

Third, attach the modeled leaf to the GrowFX splines using an 'Instanced Geometry' mesh builder. The attached geometry will stay instanced to what you see in your GrowFX model, so you can continue to edit/tweak the leaf geometry to get the right look.

 

Best, and let us know how it turns out.

Andrew

[mbe]

Thanks!. This is what I tried at first but I noticed my modeled leaf doesn't fit the curve of the path.

It was like a stick. For example, if my spline is bent, then this geometry leaf should bent too.

[Eduard]

Thanks!. This is what I tried at first but I noticed my modeled leaf doesn't fit the curve of the path.

It was like a stick. For example, if my spline is bent, then this geometry leaf should bent too.

 

Maybe you forgot to turn on the Deform along path in the "Instanced Geometry" settings...