21/11/23
Next was getting started on the water flowers. I wanted to make something similar to a water lily, but with the petals more like a lotus. Initially, I didn’t know the difference between the two and thought they were the same, but a loutse doesn’t sit on the water like a lily does. Although it does grow out of the water, its stem is long, so it doesn’t actually sit on the water.
I started off by making a single petal for the first layer, I wanted three layers since I wanted the flower to look full. Using a flat plane, I started off by shaping the outside and then adjusted the single vertices, creating a soft curve shape.
I then laid it out and duplicated it into 8 parts around the centre. Same thing for the other two layers, but for each layer, I made some changes to the petals, making them bigger and wider.
For the colour, I wanted to try out the shading in Blender. After doing a bit of studying different nodes and what they do, I got started with adding the colour ramp. With the node wrangler, I could easily adjust the mapping of the colours. I quite liked the darker pink on the outside, it worked well for the first layer, so I tried to duplicate it on the other two layers. It didn’t really show that clearly, but I wasn’t too concerned about the details on the flower as it was only a small part of the scene.
I liked the flowers on the water, even though you couldn’t really see the details. I was happy with how I managed to do the shading for the first time after not following a tutorial, so I wasn’t too bothered by not being able to see the details. With all the flowers laid out, I thought it would be quite nice to add individual spots of lights on the flowers to make it look like they were glowing, I felt that it would give it a more magical look.
I decided to remove everything except the biggest two in the middle and use those as a base to sculpt the rocks. I definitely got carried away with the sculpting, as I didn’t realise the amount of polys that I was adding on, so by the time I took a pause, I ended up with 12 million faces. This was obviously not ideal, but every time I tried to remesh to reduce the polys, my computer would freeze and crash. After a few tries, I realised that I had to make the rock again as this one was just unusable. I was a bit upset about it since I did spend quite a while getting used to sculpting in blender, but I’m very happy that I did.
I ended up remaking the whole thing from scratch. Using a cube base, I made the base in a trapezium shape. For the sculpting part, I focused on not smoothing the mesh as much as possible, as I realised that it was one of the main reasons the poly count was so high for the previous rock. I was a bit bothered by how unsmooth it was at first, but I remembered that I still had my texturing to add to it, which would cover up the lack of smoothness.
I carved a small path down the middle as a path for where the waterfall would actually be, I thought that since the water is supposed to slide down that area, the erosion from the water would cause a little dent into the rock.
Once the sculpting was done, I used the remesh modifier to bring the faces down from 500,000 to 103,00. I was very careful about how much I was reducing, even though I would leave the details to texturing. I still didn’t want to remove too many details.
Next was to make the smaller rocks. Now that my scene was imported into Blender, I wanted to try out a video I saw before. It seemed pretty simple and easy to make different rocks, so I followed the video. The video was very fast-paced, so I had to reply to some parts multiple times, but overall, the video was very easy to follow and easy to replicate too, I easily made multiple different rocks in a very short amount of time.
Keeping the original round rock I made in blender, I made five more rocks using the method from the video. The results were exactly what I needed, so using these six rocks, I duplicated as many as I needed and aligned each of them to the edge of each island, changing them slightly as they went around.
I was very happy with the rocks in the end; they were exactly what I needed to create a better flow between the water and the islands.