28/11/23
After putting it off for so long, I finally got started on making my flowers for the big tree. I went for a simple cherry blossom type of flower so I got started on making the petal in blender
I started of with a cylinder and flattened it out, using soft select I started getting the shape I wanted. Instead of using a flat plane like the water flowers I used a cylinder as I wanted more volume on these flowers. Once I was happy with the shape I started marking the seams to make the UV process easier later.
duplicating it evenly to create the base layer I rotated the petals slightly to the left so the petals wouldn’t obstruct each other too much.
Once I was happy with the shape I exported it as an OBJ into Maya to UV.
Because I had marked the seams in Blender before the UV process was a lot easier and very quick in maya.
I used the tip of one of the branches on the tree as the base branch for the flowers. For the UV, I originally wanted to have both the branch and the flower on the same UV set, but it wasn’t until joining the two meshes together and creating numerous branches that I realised that it had saved them onto two separate UV sets. I didn’t really mind this too much, as it would’ve been easier to texture on Substance Painter with them as different sets anyway, so I just left it like that.
This was my first trial on making the flower branch, it wasn’t too successful as it didn’t create volume and roundness for the tree that I planned so I tried another way.
The second trial I did was based on a YouTube video I used last year for one of my projects. Instead of placing the flowers directly onto the branch, I positioned the flowers first in a dome-like shape and then connected the branch to each flower. I definitely like this method better, and it created the type of tree I had in mind.
The branches ended up becoming a bit too crowded and started overlapping each other so I made another made two more variations of the branch, one longer too stretch out and create more volume and one smaller to fill in spaces and cover smaller branches.
Following the video I started by attaching the medium branch on the ends of each branch
I was very pleased with the way it turned out even though it didn’t have as much volume as I wanted it still achieved pretty much what I had in mind. The only issue I had now was that I did not pay attention to the poly count at all, this resulted in over one million faces just through the flowers alone. Of course I previously had this problem with the tree and big rock I sculpted before, but it wasn’t on this scale. I didn’t notice until substance painter wouldn’t load the scene no matter how many times I tried uploading it. I had to go back into maya to reduce the amount of faces using reduce, I kept sharpness around 0.6 and the reduction between 50-60 percent each go. I managed to bring it down to 200,000 but it did end up messing up the UV and mesh a little bit, mostly on the branch.