So recently I have been working on a tree generator and have been struggling with getting the right result for connecting the branches to the tree. Currently I am building the tree out of wires and then using the polywire sop to do the meshing. The problem I have run into is when the size of the trunk of the tree and the branch are different. This results in a weird buckling effect. The best alternative I have found so far as look was to convert the tree to VDBs and then back to mesh. However this loses the nice uv's that I had originally and puts my polycount through the roof. Any ideas how to get a better result?

You should be able to reduce the geometry when going from vdb to polygons; try playing with adaptivity. Then AttribTransfer the uvs back onto the new polygons.

Can you post a hip file (if adaptivity doesn't help with polygon count)? Kinda hard to understand what's causing problems…

Thanks for the reply. So I played around with the adaptivity and I have two big issues with it. Firstly it is putting a lot of polys into the smaller branches where I would prefer less detail and secondly if the branch is not along a specific axis then it's shape gets really messy when you turn up the adaptivity. Here is my .hip with the two methods I am testing as well as a video of a fellow who has somehow solved this issue in his own tree generator. Although he does mention that some parts were custom HDK nodes, so it it possible he built his own smoothing function. The part where he shows it off is about half way through.

https://vimeo.com/58316944 [vimeo.com]