Ivy Generator w2

At first I was raycasting up, forward and down locally which at first glance it did produce the correct results with some inconsistencies in the spacing between the points, but it did correctly follow surfaces. The main issue arose was when I tried to get the spline to spiral up a column. The spline did go around half of the column correctly however it would just detach halfway. This was because I was raycasting based on the main spline transforms. To fix that I will have to calculate the up and forward vectors for each point.

Issues arrived when the surface suddenly angled down and the down raycast couldn't reach it. To fix that I added an angled down and back cast which did resolve the problem, but now when a ledge appeared it would stick to it and carry on underneath which sometimes may what you want but I want to emulate the Ivy hanging off edges. I fixed it by line tracing up in worldspace after the back cast, and if the up trace hits something it wouldn't place a point an instead trigger a falling state.

So now I have the Ivy falling and but once it hits the floor again it would either fall through it or rarely go into random directions once it makes

contact.

I also added a flat offset to make the vines climb up so I can get a better preview, but this is only temporary and will need a lot of refinement.

While playing around with the column I found that the tiniest movements can completely alter the direction and look of the spline like an extreme example of the butterfly effect. This however works to my advantage as I'll only need to do tiny offsets and the child splines will go in somewhat random directions.