Tumbleweed

[meatlockerii]

hi,

I'm just wondering how would you create tumbleweed in xsi?

It would seem quite impossible to model so would using a primitive sphere with a combination of texture maps be more appropriate?

[theallusionist]

a group of primitive spheres all scaled and offset slightly differently, maybe the vein shader to do the weedy transparency
oh and a higher raydepth

a

[wurp]

I would go for dubsivision surfaces.
Make for example a sphere or a cube, hit subdivision and start extruding polygons.
Another way to do it is to simply draw a curve and extrude a circle along this curve. I dont think this would produce a very good result as the thickness of the rootsystem would be all the same, but I guess you can fix some of that by applying a displacementmap to the geometry.

Hope this helps