Forest Pack 9 Released With ForestIvy Plug-In

The newest version of the most popular scattering plug-in for 3ds Max brings plenty of updates and quality-of-life improvements, but the standout feature is ForestIvy, a tool designed to streamline the creation of realistic climbing plants while providing artists with full control over the process.

You can choose from 30 presets created with high-resolution leaf scans for maximum realism. These are great for use straight out of the box, but you can easily modify them with user-friendly parameters or use them as a foundation for your own designs. ForestIvy also allows for the mixing of artistic control with procedural growth to achieve natural, lifelike results. A simple parameter controls the blend between hand-drawn and algorithmic growth.

Customize your plants with a variety of growth patterns, heliotropism, and leaf size adjustments based on branch age and enhance complexity by layering leaves, flowers, berries, and more, allowing you to recreate nearly any type of climbing plant.

Additionally, you get to enjoy instant feedback with the custom multithreaded algorithm, eliminating the need to wait for growth simulations. Render thousands of high-poly leaves effortlessly using viewport and render time instancing. Currently, this feature is supported by Arnold and V-Ray CPU, with additional renderers expected to follow soon.

To get started with ForestIvy, check out the introductory tutorial below:

Forest Pack 9 also introduces improved use of mapping channels for the Distribution Map, which now allows the use of multiple Map Channels. A new feature in Forest Pack 9 lets you move items from the Geometry List directly to ForestSet objects, and another new point-cloud mode ensures consistent point density for all scattered objects, regardless of size, and updates the GPU only when a Forest object is modified.

Learn more about other improvements, including camera clipping updates, optimized memory usage, UI changes, and more, in the release notes here. Also, join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.