Hi folks,

Here's a few suggestions that might help short term(you know without writing a new post render product ;) ).

1. Gravity can go up to 200%, so if you want to bend quickly, kick up the gravity. I'll probably kick up this limit in the next revision.

2. If you mix gravity directions, you'll lose some magnitude down. Since the vector is normalized -100% y and -100% z means you'll only get about square root of 2 * -100% z.

3. Stiffness reduces gravity, obviously, but here's a rough outline how the numbers go and it might help when you are trying to adjust the numbers. First calculate how far along the strand you are. This is how far towards the wiggle and the gravity you will bend. First we bend towards the wiggle, reducing the bend by the stiffness. Next we take that new vector and bend towards the gravity reducing that by the stiffness.

4. Using the Preview mode on the primitive will keep memory usage down while you're working on your model, but still allow lots of strands at render time. A large portion of the memory that AGro uses is actually memory required by Carrara's 3D View to visualize the object. So while a 320k strand object with 20 segments would bring a top end machine to it's knees in the 3DView, if preview mode is set to Ultra Low, it will still be fairly responsive and still render at full resolution.

Finally, I want to hear what you think. Work on Anything Grows 2 will start shortly so let me know your concerns, suggestions, etc.

Thanks,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Freeware and commercial 3D extensions
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins