L-System madness

[Skello]

thanks for the info Fex. will try that out

[bkonersman]

I've been thinking about this approach for trees. The trick is getting usable UV's. Coral doesn't need them as much as cork oaks. Have you tried transferring UV's from a polywire version of the same lystem to a meta-generated poly model?

[fex]

hi all,

sorry being late

bkonersman: had the same mapping thinky and found no easy automatic

way... using projections on each branch works but is hell of work

and you need need some blending technique... maybe better use polywire

and displacement (or totally the other way round try shrink wrapping

polywire tree around metaball tree to get finer structure)

deecue: main reason for the ramp was having a visual feedback and

i just didn't realised your technique... after playing around found something like using metaballs as leaf input in da lsys sop which is hard

cause Houdini has lots of cooking to do but is best for precise control.

Scaled those inputs (J and K)like:

A(i): g < 4 = x TA(i-.03)

U = J (,,i)

[old school]

The lsystem SOP coupled with polywire can generate decent uv's that repeat up the tree and the branches as they fork.

In the lsystem SOP you have to turn on the option at the bottom of the first folder: Point Attributes. This builds the all important arc attribute which represents the total distance travelled from the very first point created in the l-system rules. From this the uv's can be derived.

uv's are built by the polywire. Follow the lsystem with polywire. Open up the little stowbar at the top of the polywire parameter folder to access the presets button. Using the presets button, select "Lsystem Settings". This does 95% of the work for you to properly hook up polywire to lsystem attributes.

You need to adjust the V Textures parameters using $ARC and $ARC2 for the two parameters. Multiplying both $ARC and $ARC2 by the same value will allow you to control the number of repeats up the tree. larger numers equal more repetitions. $ARC2 is the mystery variable that hasn't made it in to the documentation yet. It represents the previous point's arc attribute. This is how you march the uv's up the tree.