Breathing
- expressing calmness and beauty through the soothing motion of blossoming succulents -
Project Breakdown
I've been really fascinated by mathematical patterns in nature. Especially the mesmerizing beauty of phyllotaxis (the way how leafs in a succulent plant are growing) is something I wanted to explore in 3D
01 : 3D Scanning
The first step in the process was 3D scanning a leaf of a real succulent plant. Thanks to Aixsponza for letting me use their scanning equipment and studio
Reconstructing the 3D model was done in Reality Capture. Getting a good alignment of the pictures was challenging due to the high reflectivity and translucency of the leaf. There weren't many feature points on it's surface that the software could pick up so some manual tweaking was necessary here
Overall I'm quite happy with the raw scan result. Adding a bit of subsurface scattering suddenly makes the imperfections in the scan look like intentional surface detail :)
02 : Asset Cleanup
Although the raw 20 million polygon model looks pretty sweet already it's not really useable yet. Due to the high detail in the 3D mesh working with it becomes very slow especially when you need to copy and bend/scale it many times to create a full plant. The usual workflow is to create a low resolution version of the 3D scan that is easy to work with and “bake” all the detail into textures for rendering
I started this process in Houdini by smoothing the mesh to get rid of the bumpy scan artefacts and procedurally generating a nice quad topology (shrink-wrapping a box onto it). This way I could get good deformations when rigging the leaf later on and creating clean uvs was also really simple
Some of the bumps in the upper areas of the scan looked quite nice and I wanted to keep parts of the cleaner details. So I extracted a good area of the raw scan, straightened it and sampled the fine detail into a displacement map. This was later used in Blender as a sculpt brush texture to manually add in some of the original detail on the smoothed mesh. Blender was also used for reprojecting the low poly mesh onto the high poly one and for baking out the detail as normal and displacement maps.
As a last step I brought back the cleaned, reprojected, high detail model into Reality Capture and generated a new colour texture onto the clean uvs
03 : Succulent Rigging
Finally I had the leaf asset ready. The next step was making an entire succulent plant. I previously built a simple but rater customizable flower rig with Kinefx (the procedural rigging system in Houdini) which gives very fine control over bending and scaling of each flower petal. I used that setup as a stating point for the succulent rig and designed and animated the final plants with it
04 : Scene Assembly
As a last step I wanted to bring everything together in a short animation. I created a little assembly of some succulents blossoming on a twisted tree branch (shoutout to Aixterior for the asset). To push the realism further I had lots of fun playing with dramatic lighting, water droplets and floating dust particles. Rendering the scene was done with Octane
