Because Ivy Gen can only handle a few light pieces of geo at a time, I had to export different parts of my set at a time to get good ivy growth. This ended up being a long process, as I had to generate the ivy multiple times for the FG pillars and BG pillars, and each had to have a different growth pattern so that it would look natural and not duplicated. I played around with the settings a lot to finally get the look I was after.

When I was happy with the look, I saved out the ivy as an OBJ and imported it into my Maya scene. The imported ivy came with three shaders for the geo, two for the leaves and one for the bark. You can also map two leaf textures of your choice with an alpha to the generated cards on the ivy (Fig.07 – 08).

Lighting

I used a V-Ray dome light with a HDR image for the sky and a V-Ray rectangle light for a subtle amount of light coming from the left side of frame to carve out some shapes with shadows and add depth. I also placed cards around the scene to act as "blockers” and cast shadows where surrounding buildings in the environment would be (Fig.09).

Rendering

I used V-Ray to render the scene. I rendered a beauty pass, reflection pass, AO pass, and alpha mattes for different parts of the scene that I wanted to control in Photoshop. Pretty simple stuff. Again, these were the only passes I needed to paint with. There are way more passes you can break your renders into, but for my case it was not necessary and would've been excessive (Fig.10).