Floral Path<em>I knew going into this part of the build that I had quite a task on my hands… turns out it was even bigger than I thought </em>
I’ve been really keen to try and learn the fundamentals of modelling in blender so that in time I can create pretty much whatever pops into my imagination. But I know I’m not there yet, I’m very much still in the steepest part of the learning curve.
If you’ve read my previous journal entry you’ll know that I was intending to try and figure out how to model all the parterre garden flowers myself from scratch. Well dear reader this proved to be a slightly naïve intention. It turns out this was an even more difficult task than I thought it would be - and I thought it was going to be tricky!
The list of plants and flowers I wanted to create is quite long, I get a lot of joy out of beautiful gardens and I want to try and create something quite magical in the grounds of Castle Araluen. I decided to start with a floral archway over one of the paths, a lavender hedge and some tall flowers. These are all quite different and I hoped that if I could create these that the other flowers on my list would be derivations of them. They also happen to be some of my favourite elements of formal gardens.
Xanthia Flower (Floxglove / Hydranga hybrid)
Things started off pretty well as I was able to create a sort of flowerglove/hydrangea hybrid which I rather like and I’m calling an Xanthia by following along with this tutorial by Kaizen. However the other flowers proved to be an all together more difficult task.
After spending several days getting more and more annoyed at myself for my lack of progress and becoming increasingly frustrated at not being able to find a tutorial on YouTube that could help me out I had a realisation, or more specifically a recollection. I remembered that when I first started my tech job many, many moons ago one of the most useful ways I found for helping me to improve my CAD skills was to go through other peoples models and work out how they had built their incredibly complex geometry. I’ve always learned best from worked examples, I’m definitely more of an applied knowledge person rather than raw theorist.
My recollection prompted me to go in search of blender asset files complete with their geometry node trees that I could purchase and learn from and modify. After a couple of hours of searching I found some beautiful flower models on superhive which have proved to be incredibly helpful and exactly what I was looking for. I’ve learned a huge amount from these models, the only downside has been that it has revealed a whole new aspect of Blender / visual effects I need to learn about; alembics. Definitely an example of “the more you know, the more you realise you don’t know” in action, wise man Aristotle!
Lavender Hedge
Lavender hedges are one of my most favourite things, they are beautiful to look at, almost always alive with the buzzing of bees going about their work and they smell utterly divine especially when you run your fingers through the stems. A real treat for the senses. There is a fair bit of it flowering in our garden at the moment so I had a good reference to work from.
Without wanting to sound like a broken record I have made quite a lot of modifications to the original node tree to create the plants that you see above. The blooming flower assets come with some pretty cool growth animation sequences (where the alembics come in) but I didn’t need this for the parterre garden so I’ve stripped all the animation out and simplified the elements in a bid to try and help my GPU out.
The lavender plant in the asset pack is a small clump with three flower stems, so I had to do a lot of head scratching to figure out how to arrange them in a row. Having spent a few hours playing with the node tree I was able to work out how to build a new branch in the tree that positions the leaves at various points up the stem and also varies the size of the leaves so that they scale down the higher up the stem they are (the original plant has the leaves arranged in a clump at the bottom which wasn’t what I wanted). I then built my own node tree that took the individual stems and distributed them along a curved surface (created using an extruded quadratic) with a degree of randomness applied to the scale to make it look a bit more organic. I also added some leaves that come out normal to the curved surface but that also have some amount of angular control so that they can help emulate the beautiful rows of lavender that one would see in the fields of Provence in France. I can’t take any credit for the flower heads, leaves or the stems themselves as I left much of the core node tree untouched.
Rose Arch
Having had some success with the lavender I moved on to trying to create a series of arches covered in spiralling roses over one of the pathways. I’ve always had a thing for roses, probably largely because it’s part of my name but beyond that they are just beautiful in form, fragrance and colour. It is little wonder to me that they have become the go-to flower for gestures of the romantic kind. I’ve planted various ‘Old Roses’ around our ‘real life’ garden over the years, this year they seem to have started to mature beautifully and we have been treated to an abundance of blooms which in the cool of both the mornings and evenings are giving off the most wonderful aroma. It’s pretty special.
But I digress, back to virtual roses! Creating these hoops was a multi step process. Step 1 was to create the supporting arch hoop which was pretty simple, just an arc with a circle profile to create a mesh, finished off with a black metal material - simples, yay! Step 2 was creating an offset of the hoop arc to then instance the rose heads on coming out normal to surface of the hoop. I used the poisson disc distribution so that I could set a minimum distance so the blooms didn’t overlap each other. Step 3 was trickier, I basically took the trunk I’d used to create the wisteria trees from this tutorial and rerouted it to use the hoop arc as the input curve so it would wrap around it and then upped the spiral count until I liked the look of it. Step 4 was instancing the branches of leaves around the roses, these are a variation of the leaves I used for the wisteria trees. The final step was to position a series of hoops along a line and create a couple of variations of the rose array to make it look more organic and natural.
I still need to put some colour variation into the flowers and also the size of each bloom to add to the natural look, but it’s a start. I also want to change the shading on the petals to have more tones in them and have a more watercolour effect. But that’s a task for another day.
Floral Pathway
Pretty pathway with lavender and a rose arch
While I’m really quite pleased with how this pathway is looking at the moment. It’s not done yet as I do still need to figure out how simplify the lavender and the roses a bit more for two reasons;
They are still pretty heavy graphically which even though I have a really, really impressive graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090) on my pc I’m starting to get to the limit of what it can render in the full scene. I also need to start figuring out how to bake certain aspects to reduce the load on the graphics memory further. (The pretty pathway image above is just a screen grab of Blender because my computer said “no” to rendering it!)
Aesthetically the flowers are a bit too realistic at the moment. I’m trying to create an art style for the Vale of Araluen that is a bit more stylised and softer.
So there is a fair bit of work to do on this yet. But it’s a good a start, it’s certainly a lot further than I thought I was going to get a week or so ago! I’ve learned loads over the last couple of weeks and despite having a pretty big wobble last week where I thought there was no way to achieve the Vale of Araluen that lives in my imagination I think I’ve actually made quite a bit of progress. I’m also really pleased that I’ve managed to avoid using plugins and ‘isolated assets’ (as in ones you can’t modify).
I think with each element I take on I’m getting better at playing and experimenting to ‘see what happens if I do this, or that’ and in many ways that is when I’ve learned the most. I’m also getting better at just trusting the process. The world I worked in for so long demanded a ‘right first time’ approach with insanely tight turnarounds which was incredibly toxic. I’ve only just begun to realise over the past couple of months how much damage that has done to me creatively. Learning how to be more childlike again in my approach - to just play and explore without needing to see immediate results has required quite a shift and I’m still learning how to be kinder to myself, but as with the progress made on each of these flowers, with each one I’m getting a little better.
Happy Solstice!
