1. Inspiration
The inspiration for this project was a traditional vintage botanical illustrations of a wild rose. I did this project with Maxons Software Cinema4D and Adobe Photoshop. In the following steps I’m briefly going to explain how I made my rose.
2. Gather your reference material
First I picked a rose from our garden. That way it wasn’t one of those typical rose types you find at the flower shop. I took the rose apart so I could understand how it was built.
3. Modelling the leaves
I figured I’ll be needing at least three different types and sizes of petal. I started off with a flat surface and modeled my petal types from there. For seeds in the middle and the leaves under the roses head I used the array tool. That way they could be arranged really easily.
4. Textures
For the textures I scanned the petal and the leaves . I cut the background out of the leafs in Photoshop and used it as a texture on a bent surface in combination with an alpha-channel of this leaf. That way I was going to have that leafy edge without a lot of effort. I also made a gray scale image of it to use as a bump map for the fine wains of the leaf.
5. Arranging the rose
After having all the elements of the rose ready and textured is was time to put them together.
6. Arranging the scene and rendering
For the vintage looking rose I figured I had to arrange it quite illogical. The rose, the buds and most of the leaves had to be facing the camera directly. I arranged my rose like that for a couple of single renders because looking from other angles it would look really weird.
I hope this was interesting and maybe inspiring to start your own 3D flower or plant. If you have ever done botany in 3D I’d love to see it or if you have any questions you are welcome to send me a message.