Ivy Generator w4

Splinemesh...

According to my schedule I should be implementing child splines to sprout from the main stem and continue to cover the mesh further, but I decided against it because I wanted to visualize the tool and tackle any unforeseen issues arise with adding meshes. It's also a failsafe as if I run out of time I have an ivy generator but with just one stem.

I made implementing the splinemesh a lot more complicated than it should've been. I tried to calculate a lot more based off of nothing, but all I had to do was rotate the spline points as they were being created based on the normal of its surface and let the splinemesh set its up vector based on the position and rotation on the spline.

Here are some failed splinemsh blueprints:

I made 4 simple leaf planes with just a basecolour and some simple grass wind to visualize the tool. With these rough meshesthe tool quickly took shape and started looking like something you'd use in a game, not a line with dots. I used curves to control the scale of the leaves and stem along the spline. This was also the first time I used instanced static meshes which really was needed as having 150 individual static meshes will make the tool useless on optimization standards.

Just picking random leaves and placing them at random locations did seem like a good idea on paper, but pure randomness is never good. The leaves would clump up together and spawn the same leaf right next to each other which didn't look good at all. I fixed it by calculating each leaf position depending on the length of the spline and spreading them out equally. I also added a slight random offset to make it feel more natural. To fix the repeating leaves I simply checked if the last leaf is the same as the next one and if it was, it should choose another.