Hey all!

I have been working hard today, trying to figure out how to make an ivy leaf without a distort category in in Cycles's node system and oh snap was it hard!! HE helped me make two different shapes. One that looks more like a heart and the other that looks more like a weirdly shaped helmet. I think both shapes will look great for the Ivy Generator.

After finishing the shapes, I like looking at the surprise HE leaves in the node system. HE usually leaves some kind of image there to discover. In today's case, it was almost too big to print screen (it just fit enough to have some cropping safe zone). Here it is:


When I saw it on it's side, immediately I thought of a floating city from some game or movie, but when I turned it like the above, it looked more like a chandelier. I know it technically hangs off center, but if you look where the wires connect, you'll see it is natively unbalanced, lol.

I just adore making something beautiful out of something extremely technical (^^,)!

Right now for more info on the system though. Half of it (the left half as above), is all that is needed for a basic leaf's shape. The right half is to make it a patch within leaf pattern. That meant having to duplicate the whole left for the whole right (see, not as much work as it would seem). I do admit that this one is very technical and it's easy to get lost in the whole thing, but I enjoy working with procedural textures (and yes, this will be covered in the book).

I am really excited to kick-off with the Cycles tutorials next week and it is gonna be so much fun to write!! Hope you are looking forward to it as much as I am (the release of the book).

Thank YOU for the picture surprises in the node system! YOU rock!!!