Modeling the flower for the
opening and end sequence

Today I started working on the flower appearing in the opening and end sequence of the movie. Starting out, I didn’t have much to go on, other than Andreas‘ description: Purple petals, orange in the middle. I also had a frame from the storyboard. However, I didn’t know whether the storyboard design was meant for use in the film as the petals were rather angular:

Based on the information I had, I then started modeling the flower which was very much straight forward. I basically made everything from the primitives plane, sphere, cone and cylinder and modified the different elements using cut, extrude, bevel and a lot of moving, rotating and scaling. The usual stuff. After a little while I achieved the basic shape:

Wondering if the petals were too edgy, I asked Jamie for his opinion, which ended in us agreeing that I should probably round the edges. Luckily, I only needed to remove some edges and it went fairly quickly:

Having finished modeling, except some leaves for the stalk, I proceeded to texturing. I didn’t have any I could use, so was it was pretty clear I had to paint my own. Trying to find the right look, I made a good old google image search and found  a ton of references. I will most certainly not list them here as this post is long enough as it is Based on said reference I noticed how most petals were lighter close to the center of the flower and darker close to the edge. I also found fine lines or veins flowing from the tip of the petal to the flower center. Possibly in the other direction. Can’t really tell which. Based on that I did a quick (emphasis on quick) texture for the petals:

I created a bump map from the same image. Back in max, I gave the flower a slight falloff and found that I got a better result, without increasing rendering time significantly, by using the bump map as a displace map instead of, well, a bump map:

By talking to Aleksander and Jamie, I decided the petals were a bit too bright, and darkened them a bit:

The stalk texture was made entirely from procedurals. Two falloffs, a splatter and a noise if I remember correctly. The orange center is nothing more than noise in the displacement slot and an orange colour with a yellow falloff. Then, having finished most of the texturing, I went on to create a few leaves for the stalk. I started with a plane, made the leaf shape using editable poly and used the shell and bend modifiers to give them their final shape:

These too needed a texture, though it is heavily based on the texture for the stalk. Only thing I really needed to add was a bump map, which I hastily created in Photoshop:

High quality texture in other words. I applied it to the leaves and found that though it doesn’t hold up that well on extreme close-ups, it’ll probably do for the camera angles we need:

Having finished modeling and texturing, and rigged the thing in a sensible way so we only have to use two basic controllers to animate it, I put the flower into the landscape in its current state:

All in all, I’m fairly satisfied with how the flower turned out. The things I still don’t quite like are that the petals might be a bit too big and that they look flat somehow. The textures I made aren’t precisely first class either. Another thing is that the only Green Spill team member who has yet to see the flower is Andreas who described to me how it should look. It’s the weekend and he hasn’t got much of an internet connection at home. So here’s hoping I didn’t butcher his vision too badly

Finally, I ran the scene through Nuke to apply some DoF and colour correction. I also tried to blend the skies and the mountains a little better. The result is in the top image of this post. As you might have noticed, that image is a bit pixelated and strange which comes from the DoF I applied. I’m not entirely sure what went wrong there and am too tired to investigate right now, so I’ll save it for later. I’ll mention the solution in a later post if I find one.