gw:Ivy

gw:Ivy is a plug-in utility for 3DS Max that helps you easily grow ivy plants in any 3D model with as little effort as possible.

Start growing ivy

This isn’t a “one-click wonder” as it comes with plenty of customizable parameters that in order to make it suitable for the environment. The plant starts developing from root, so it needs to be located in a proper position, such as a wall or a tree mesh.
The list of settings provided in the configuration panel allow defining various parts of the growing process as well as adjust the values for making it look right.

Adjust overall looks of the plant

The seedling can be customized in terms of grow speed, attraction to the mesh, branching probability, floating length of a branch before dying away or the maximum number of child branches that can further develop the plant.
Additional adjustments touch on refining the looks of the ivy plant so that it fits the scene. As such, the developer provides the necessary knobs for controlling the size of a branch, leaf distribution and orientation as well as their size.
More settings touch on aspects such as visibility of the branches viewport and rendering, define a texture and color of the leaves according to the age of the branch and the leaf geometry.

Conclusion

gw:Ivy seems like an easy way to simulate organic growing of an ivy plant and customize the growth speed and various aspects such as branching or leaf color and texture.
It provides plenty of powerful customization settings and the developer makes available sufficient documentation to learn working with it quickly. Before trying to use it make sure the plug-in supports your version of 3DS Max.