'Stargazer' (Work in Progress)
This excercise is a continuation of the work undertaken for the 'Species' render. It's work in progress, but I thought it was worth uploading to illustrate how your techniques can evolve. It's clear from 'Species' that making flowers look convincing is very difficult. The use of a procedural texture (Fractal Noise in my case) to create a life-like surface on a petal is unlikely to succeed without infinite patience. Getting an acceptable result takes ages, while you go through the inevitable trial and error phase. The best results without doubt, come from texture maps. But there's a price to pay.
The 'Stargazer' flowers are made from six 'identical' petals, each mapped with an image I created using Photogenics. This also involved much tweeking of both the image map and petal model to get optimum results. The main problem is that the petals are recurved (bent in two directions), while the mapping can only be done along a single axis. Refer to Tutorial 3 for details on image mapping. In effect, I applied a full size decal to the upper surface of the petal. This allows any number of individual petals to be rendered with superb results. The downside is that each flower head has to be constructed from six petals and all the other flower parts, in Layout. You can't create a multi-petalled flower in Modeler, then apply a single image map to this in Layout. The map would be projected onto all the petals together, as if they were a single target.
You may have noticed that this full size 'Stargazer' image is slightly different from the thumbnail shown on the Gallery page. This is because the petals were temporarily 'distorted' prior to the render to give them some individuality. That's the problem with simply duplicating a 'perfect' petal six times. They're all perfect and life just ain't like that. The distorted petals could be saved as individually named models, but it's a chore. So, the easy way to get a little realism is to distort your elements just prior to rendering and hope for the best. I think the results are pretty good, especially when compared with the Thompson & Morgan brochure which inspired the work.
According to them, 'Stargazer' is the World's most popular lily. There's certainly no doubting its appeal, I grow 'em every year. Glorious! Why not grow some yourself? And watch out for a LightWave Tutorial on 'Stargazer', coming soon.
