 Thank you all for coming. I really appreciate it. My name is Jaroslav Zedze, but people call me DJ. It's easier, especially not for non-Polish people, because it's a Polish name it's hard to pronounce for other nations. Generally, I am an interior designer. I studied interior design in Gdańsk Fine Arts Academy. I slowly, throughout my career, gradually shifted towards CGI and 3D generalism as my core thing. I'm doing 3D modeling, texturing, animation, other things like that. This presentation I will be doing is about plants. It's titled I Love It When A Great Plant Comes Together. Obviously, some of you might have watched the 80s series, the 18th, so it's like a paraphrase of Hannibal Smith. I'm hoping this presentation will be fun, so maybe I'll show first a little bit of my work, what I do. Currently I'm working for CGBoost as a community manager, helping people learn Blender, like overcome some roadblocks and general help. I also have been working for a year for Graswald, so the library of 3D scanned 3D modeled assets for the realistic assets. I have permission to use some of the work in progress stuff from the pipeline from Julius Harling, so I really appreciate it. Thank you, Julius. Just a quick introduction to my show reel. Thank you very much. This is Blender. I will be using Blender for today's presentation. For the work at Graswald, we were using some in-house tools, but I will be sticking to Valila Blender, so no add-ons. Hopefully, this will be useful for all of you. But first, before we jump into Blender, I want to talk a little bit about the presentation, what it's all about, and maybe why plants are interesting and why do I find them really fun, to be honest. I never thought that I would find plants that interesting. I don't know how many of you have read the books by Tuve Jansson. I see some faces there, recognizing the Moomins. There were kind of creatures there. They were called Hemulans. As a child, I thought that these were the most unpleasant ones. I never wanted to be like them, really. The specific thing is that they were really like order. I considered myself more chaotic, like creative. They were like order rules, and they were really interested in plants. So collecting plants, looking at them with the magnifying glass. So the irony is I turned out to be one myself. Right now, I'm walking around my neighborhood and obsessively watching plants up close. People probably think I'm crazy sometimes. So yeah, but plants are not really boring. Plants were really almost even used in pop culture as monsters. I don't know if you've ever seen the horror movie, The Day of the Trifids. It's like plants invading from space, eating people alive. Really scary, but they are really scary in nature as well. This is near my neighborhood with a little creative twist from me. So beware, plants are also dangerous. They can suck you in and they really captivate your attention. So why do I show these references? Because references are the starting point for all of the plant work. We really need to learn to see the plants before we recreate them in 3D. Because the point of my presentation, like the course, will be first analyzing the plants and then trying to recreate them in Blender. And I won't be doing like the whole process because it's like a super laborious task and 50 minutes is not enough time for the whole process. And that was also not part of my job. We already received some scanned assets from the scanning team at Graswald. So if you're really interested in that part of the process like photogrammetry, I highly recommend watching if you haven't watched Gleb Alexandrov's talk. And he's a really great professional. And I'm sure he can tell much more about how to get those scanned parts really, really good quality. So let's take a look at the plants. I will be using like a specific plant for this presentation. And it will be, let me just open up Blender. It will be a plant that I've already assembled for Graswald. So the common hop, let me just open where you're in Amsterdam. So this is, not this file. Sorry. Yeah, that's another plant that Amsterdam is famous for. And the interesting thing that I've learned while preparing this presentation is that actually the plant Cannabis Sativa, this one is like the same plant family as the common hop, which I will be assembling. Yeah, but I'm not really a smoker. So I'd rather have a beer. So and Amsterdam is famous for brewery as well. So let's open up the correct file. It needs some time. Yeah, but plants need time as well. We have to be patient. We have to do it slowly not to lose all the details that are important. And I'm really going to focus on the details here because the problem with 3D plants often and also especially when they are automatically generated by procedural algorithms, if they don't take into account all the details that are in the world, it's really easy to achieve something that kind of resembles a plant, but it's not fully to the point in nature. And I'll be explaining why that happens and hopefully give some tips how to approach this and what's the benefit of the manual approach to modeling plants. Just loading the textures, really good scans. So maybe while we're waiting for the texture to load, let's have a look at the references. So it's nice to have your own pictures of plants and even better if you take a look at them in the real world like in 3D because that gives an even better feeling of the plant than just watching the photos which are flat. And plants are really three-dimensional, really complicated forms. And there are a few key points that I want to emphasize in the common hope especially. And that's why I picked the plant because it's really interesting. One of the key things that makes the plant look as it looks like is the way that it's interacting with the environment. It's a climber plant. So its name is common hope. I wasn't really like aware how common it is. And in my neighborhood there's a lot of specimens of this. And I took some pictures while walking. So you can see it climbs some fences, climbs other plants, it climbs walls, passes the walls. Seems like it's destroying everything. Really dangerous. I would watch out if I was this guy. And it's also interacting with itself. So it's kind of like sometimes searching for some point of support. And if it doesn't find it, it just turns back and climbs itself. So it's really interesting. All right. So there are also little things that are easy to omit when analyzing plants. There are leaf shapes that are the most typical ones, three-part ones. But there are also heart-shaped ones in the same plant. And you might think that it's obvious that the three-part leaves grow out of the same point, like here, two of the same kind of leaves. But it also happens sometimes that from the same point two different leaves grow out. So these little details make real plants not so easy to replicate automatically. At least you have to know it. And manual assembly of the plant is a really great way to observe. So leaf shapes, the leaf stalks, how they branch out out of the main stalk, and how they form an angle with the leaf. So a lot of reference, it took hours for each plant to really see how it looks like in nature. And there's also factors like decay and a lot of factors that are destroying the plant while it's there. You can see here's an old one. That's also like a specific characteristic of the common hop that it's not a one-year growing plant. It's a perennial. So it grows for many years. And you might also think that the common hop is like the plant with those cones, right? The plants have their sex life, really. So they are male and female ones. The ones with those nice cones are female. Okay, so sometimes you want to understand how the plant grows. And it's really a good practice to have a look at the young ones, like the sprouts. Because there you can easily see like the growing pattern. Plants are growing like from the top. So already in that little specimen you can see how it behaves. And later on it's just like bigger and bigger. All right, I'm thinking that it's almost what we need for a start. And we can get to blender. Of course, for a start, you need, as I mentioned, good scans. And good scans, as I told you, are not that easy to make. You can ask Gleb. It demands some practice, some nice equipment, some experimentation, and a lot of patience, and a lot of photos. Luckily, we have some already prepared elements from Graswald. So this is how my blend file looks like when I started assembling a plant. So where does it start from? I started from a stalk. Let's pick one of them. It's a little bit laggy. Maybe I'll turn off the... We won't need that anymore now. Okay, so it should be faster now. So what to do with this kind of a scanned object? Like, we can keep it as it is. But what's really interesting is when we can change this shape, because when you disassemble a plant, it behaves a little bit differently than in an environment. So a good way of having control over that thing is making an armature for it. So I'll show you quickly how you can do that. So I'll just duplicate this. Put it on here. And generally, we'll be... I forgot one thing. Sorry. Let's maybe make a quick introduction to the whole process and play a short video. I want to impersonate... Because plants are really hard work, so maybe you're lazy and you don't want to do it. So I'm going to try a one-minute approach to that, just like the lazy tutorials from Ian Hubert. So let's try it and let's see if it works. So generally, how you start. Just take a stalk, make an armature for it, and then it bends. You connect one to the other. Don't forget the tip. Yeah, just blend it. Put it together. It's nicely forming up. Put on the little leaves. Reform them. Some more leaves. Join it all together. Just remember to shape it because it's not flat. Just little touch-ups. And those little thingies, these are also important. Don't miss them. Join everything together and repeat, repeat, repeat. And you get yourself a nice little plant. But if you want to have young little plants, you need some cones. Okay, so just put them together. A few of them. And there you go. Easy peasy. Yep, we might end on that one, but I guess we have to slow it down a bit so that you can actually know what's happening. So if we have that kind of a stalk, and we want to achieve something like that, so that when we go to the post-mode, we can just bend it, right? It's good to have the geometry quite clean. So let's have a look at the scan. Yeah, it's all triangulated. I prefer to make the quads instead of triangles, at least for that process. So increase the quads. I also sometimes these scans had some double vertices or stuff like that, so just merge by distance and make a threshold. That's suitable. I'm just doing this because it's useful maybe too much. It's 004, right? Let's repeat. Merge by distance. One more zero. Should be fine. Okay. And now how to make a rig for this one. Let's just select one edge here. If we're lucky, it's going through a whole length. Oh, we're lucky. Yes, sometimes it's a little bit more complicated. You need to select a few edges, and then just select more with the shift. But that's not really hard. So if you select it, duplicate it. And actually that's it. This amateur trick is one that I learned from Steven Scott. So thanks. And now we have separated this selection. Okay, we have another mesh here. That's kind of following the shape. But I want to be, yeah, I want it to be in the middle of it. So how to do that? I'll just move it. But let's do it along the normal. So I'm just extruding it, selecting all of it. And now I can scale, scale along the normals. So I can kind of blend it inside. Nice. If I take a look at the whole thing, I can select the other edge. I don't need it anymore. So I'm just getting rid of it. But it's not really even. So let's use the great add-on called loop tools, right? Now I can space all the points. And I have something that's kind of useful for my purpose. But this is just a mesh, how to turn it into an armature. There's a little trick that you can do. You just apply a modifier, a skin modifier. Some blob appeared. But don't worry. This is just for this little button. Let's create an armature. Boom. It produced something weird. I'll tell you why. Let's control Z back one step. If you go into the edit mode, you can see that little circle. It's the root of the skinned mesh. So let's put it into the first word, right? Let's mark this as root. Okay. Now the circle is around the first word. And it should work fine. Now if we leave that, edit mode, and press create armature. Oh, it's fine. Now all we need to do is just parent this little stalk. So control P with automatic weights. And let's hope for the best. Yeah, it did work. Usually with this kind of shape, it works if the geometry is pretty watertight and good. So now if we select the stalk and go to pose mode, we should have a nice bending thing, right? And it's a really nice way of deforming such a climber plant because you have bones all over the place. And you can select even like a part of it, just a few bones and rotate it. But the key thing is here to have the individual origins for the bones. So like each bone is rotating around its own origin. And it's kind of looking like very flexible, like a deforming stalk. Also, one useful feature for this kind of deformation is the auto IK here. So I can select one bone. And it kind of like when I grab it, it kind of like resembles something springy. And if you grab it, you can see that little line here. Maybe I'll just scroll the mouse wheel so you can kind of like control the length of it. This is also a nice way of straightening it out. So now it's super straight and we can start from scratch, right? The bending. So if you have some stalk that's having like a specific shape, now you can shape it into something different. And it still looks good. All right. But that's just the stalk. We need all the other parts, right? I'll just reset the rotations right now. Let's keep it clean. And let's go to the object mode again. So now let's get rid of the blob. And let's start adding the other parts. So first of all, like in the one minute tutorial, we need the little tip. I'll copy this one. It's looking nice. So control D. It's parented there. So let's just clear the parent. All right. So let's put it here. We can all just place it like that and scale it so that it fits. Later on, it shouldn't be visible if we place it correctly. We can also use the bone here for the placement. Snap the cursor. Now snap it. That's better. And it's a lot of that kind of tweaking. It's good to look from time to time to the reference and see how the plant really looks like here. Maybe it should have some additional little leaves here. But I'll just move on forward because the time is running, right? Already quite far. So let's go on and add some leaves. But what if we want to now change this whole shape? So let's parent this thing to the bone. So select the bone. And that's the trick I will be using to kind of keep this modular and yet deformable. Select this with shift and control P to bone, right? So now when I deform the whole thing, the tip falls. All right. Let's pick another one. This little leaf looks nice. Or maybe something like this. This one is okay. Let's just duplicate it. The first leaves that are growing out of these first points are usually kind of undeveloped yet. So this is a perfect one. It's good to have a look at the whole atlas of all the scant parts and see what's working for which part. These are a lot of different stages of leaves. And it's good to place them in the correct place, right? So what if you have like a little bit too little elements? Well, you can still use the same ones, but just remember to deform it a little bit. If you go to the edit mode and you just change the shape slightly, it shouldn't be very visible that it's the same leaf anymore. But you work with what you have, right? So another one thing that's good to observe is that the leaves are following specific rules. Usually there are a few factors that are affecting this. Like they're growing out of the same point for the common hop, but they are usually pointing upwards towards the light. So and also each point is kind of like twisted, but it's good to kind of like see that most of the leaves are kind of like pointing in the same sameish direction, right? But because it's also dependent on the gravity, on the size of the leaf and the surroundings, right? So let's also select a bone here and connect this the same way. So we have something now. It's good to be aware where you're at in terms of modes, right? Now we can do it. It's really nice and you can use it then to animate those little, you know, time lapse videos where the plant is moving or growing, right? If you scale it, scale this bone. Maybe an additional bone for these ones would also be good just to be able to scale the leaves independently of the stalk. Okay, but we don't have time to make everything perfect because we have to move on. Mm-hmm. What if you want to keep the leaf non-destructively deformable? Well, there's a nice object that's, you can use of course an armature, which is quite good. You know, I have this prepared here, just the same as for the stalk. You can then go and bend the leaves, but then you have to edit the mesh in the edit mode, which is quite destructive, right? But using proportional editing is also like a good technique. And also sometimes I use it because the leaves that are scanned are usually scanned, you know, flat on the surface. And this is not how they really behave in the real world, right? They are more of like V-shaped or some small deformations, right? So it's good to implement this either in edit mode or you can also, and that's actually how we did it in GrassVault, you can just place lattice. Of course, you need to scale it correctly and place it that it fits, right? So it kind of fits the leaf, but this kind of lattice is like not the best for the leaf. I'll just set it up as a one-dimensional in this direction and a little bit more subdivisions in the other ones. And now just apply a lattice modifier. All right, so this, you know, it was all done automatically by the add-ons, so that's not waste time for that. You get the idea, you have the lattice, you have to place it correctly, you know, those little things in Bender. And now you can kind of deform it independently for each part of the mesh and it's really nice. So you keep the original mesh, but you have the modifier so you can play with it. And if you duplicate the same leaf with the lattice, you can have like different versions of the same scan. Right, so let's have a look at how to join the leaf and the stalk, because these bigger ones, I tend to have them in separate parts just because they're usually forming an angle like this with the stalk. And I also, I think I parented this already so that you can deform the stalk however you want, because sometimes these leaves grow like from the stalk and then forming like a little bit of a bend. So they grow out like downwards, for example, and quickly bend upwards. And the other one is doing it something like the other way, right? Let's get rid of those annotations. I think this one is too big for this spot, so I'll place it here. Here's something smaller, right? So in these little leaves, I think it's less noticeable that the leaves are the same, but for the other ones, I want to have like a different scan, right? So these two are perfect for this part. All right, I think I'm running out of time. So maybe, you know, you just get the idea that this is the repetition of the whole thing. But there are little things that are easy to omit when you omit when you're making such a plant. And these are the little thing is here, like the stipulize. If you take a look at the close-ups of the plants, and this is common for a lot of plants that they have these branching out points for the stalks, and they have like these little parts. So this is quite important. Thanks. Those little things that sometimes you forget, and it's flat as well, right? And we need to kind of bend it. So let's just now proportional editing is quite useful. I want to have it wrapping around, wrapping around the stalk. All right. So now just placing it in the correct place. Let's pick the bone, the cursor. So you can see it's quite time consuming if you're doing this manually. But it pays off at the end. They usually bend outwards like that. Maybe it's too much to be careful. Okay. So you have to repeat that process for all of this. And at the end, you're left with something that resembles this kind of thing. And that's more like it. So how much time do we have left? 20 minutes, right? So maybe we'll do also the cones. In fact, the plants that I was assembling, the hops that were assembled for Draswell, they were in a specific time of the year. And that's also like an important part in plants. They have like a life cycle. And it's not the same in every season, right? So they were scanned in spring. So they had no cones. And now, let's say I have a brewery that's in need for some render with cones. What to do? I have no cones scanned. Okay. Sometimes we can cheat, right? Can we? Of course, it's best if you have something scanned. But these little stipulates, they kind of resemble the parts that are used for the cone. So here I already assembled some. Just edited the shader a little bit. And it kind of looks okay. Maybe not perfect, but it works, right? So I don't recommend this technique for all the times. But if you're in a hurry, that's a good way. And it's all done by just modeling and just modifying a little bit the shapes of it. And it's kind of working. I think I'll be heading towards the end of this. It would be quite repetitive, just tweaking each part and taking a look at how we can make it more close to the reference. Maybe add some destroyed leaves in the bottom, because there's animals biting off the pieces of leaves and stuff like that. But let's make it a little bit more fun and try to make a little scene out of it, right? So how to put that plant, because maybe you get a ready-made plant and you want to just have fun with it. So now you know how to make an armature for that. And let's open my other file. Just waiting a little bit. So maybe I'll talk a little bit about the shaders as well. Because the shaders were coming from the scanning team together with the scanned models. But we had to check some roughness maps and stuff like that. And the roughness map is a tricky part, because let's maybe get back to the reference board. Let's load it. It's full of photos, so it takes a little bit of time. And the roughness of the plant is kind of not constant, because it's dependent on the environment. Right now we have quite like rainy foggy weather in Amsterdam. So probably most of the plants are wet. And when they are wet, they're like shiny, specular. And also it kind of depends. For example, if a plant is like next to a dusty road, then the leaves are catching the dust and they can be really, really diffused. So having that knowledge is also useful. And that also comes from observation. Like you really need to observe. And I think like this is the word that I really want you to get out of this presentation. Observation. Oh, this is a scene I made. I know this is not allowed with Blender Logo. Sorry. It was a joke. I just couldn't resist. So we have a fence here. And thanks for the assets Blender Kit. It was from Blender Kit. So a lot of assets here. And our plants from Gasvald. The material preview. Let's wait for the shaders load. So one more thing that is important in terms of shaders in plants is that plants are translucent. And this is like very crucial, especially if you have a strong lighting. But it's generally, even if it's not visible, it's affecting how the plant is looking. Because even if you don't see the plant on the other side of the light, when the translucency is obvious, I'll show it in the reference board. Like this, right? These are the photos that kind of like are obvious. The light that's going through the leaves is scattered all across the plant. So that's why plants are really greener than anything else. Because yeah, they just make the light pass through the leaves and it's colored already. So see if it loads. It takes patience. That's why it's nice to have a nice library of pre-made assets and not have to go through the pain, right? But it's also fun, I guess. This is the Blender Kit atom. So yeah, I was just using some assets from that library to just quickly assemble a scene. All right, I think like Blender just hung up. The computer didn't handle it. So I guess that's most of what I have prepared for the presentation. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. How do you go? I think it was like 4K, like what we received. But this was also like there was like a system of LODs, right? So the meshes were all, but this wasn't like part of our job. It was automated by the in-house tools. Yeah. We were assembling in the biggest LOD with the most resolution to make the plant really look up close nicely. And then it's easier to destroy stuff and build up, right? So upscale. So you also scanned the stuff? Yes. Yeah, I think, you know, they were scanning them on a flat plane. But yeah, this wasn't like part of my job exactly, but the scanning team. But yes, from what I know, it was like a mirrored stuff, like so it was like blended together, but it was mirrored on the other side. I also had a second question, that's okay, rotating makes it very natural for a plant. Yeah, yeah. That's, well, probably there are many ways of doing that, but you know, having like an armature and like deforming it, it's kind of like, it allows for like replication of how, you know, something bendy works. Yeah, I mean, yeah, like a spline can be easier. Yeah, sometimes, sometimes these plants are also like kind of rapidly turn, right? It's not like always like smooth curve. You can, you can take a look at some references, like sometimes it seems like it's almost breaking. It's really tangled and of course, these assemblies were also like, not these extreme cases, right? They were kind of like scanned from a field of other, you know, I think it was a meadow kind of hope. So it's, it's a little bit more generic. It's less like these fence ones, which are kind of, yeah, one-sided and any more questions? I think, I think, yeah, alpha texture works fine for that. You know, it's, if it's, if it's done well, you can also like make some texture painting stuff in terms of making this decay and just like overlaying on a ready scanned part. And it's, yeah, but, you know, it's always like a game of balance, right? You have to, if you're, if you're doing like a plant that will be viewed up close, I think is, yeah, it's, it's worth it, right? Because alpha map can be like, especially if you have a scan thing, modeling this up like with all the details in a model is like super high poly, right? And with a scan, alpha map, you can have it really, really detailed and the model is quite, you know, optimized, so to speak, right? In terms of poly count, especially that there are many leaves usually, right? Any more questions? Like there? Yeah, actually, like, yeah, real-time, real-time is not like my biggest thing, but I'm, I know that the Grasswalt library, like it was automatically like creating LODs for, for all the assets. And like the lower poly, of course, they were not as realistic, right? But they're also like not meant to view, to be viewed like up close, like for, for these kind of like ad shots or stuff like that. So there's a, there's a, there's a difference, right? But it's good to start from us, from something like really, really detailed and then just destroy it. So anything else that you would like know from me, if you, if you have any questions, like I'll be free to talk with anyone interested after the talk. I still have some ending words, right? So thanks for, thanks for the, for the reminder, right? So first of all, thank you all for coming and for, for the patience and for all the hiccups, the technical hiccups, but I'm hoping that it was at least a little bit interesting and that you get something out of it. And I want to again thank the Grasswalt team that allowed for, for presenting these tips from, from this workflow. And I cannot thank enough Arthur Olman, the head of 3D there when I was working at least, and Aaron Springer for providing feedback. And that's the, like for, for final kind of summary takeaways. Like first, the key thing, of course, the tools and techniques are different, you know, you can use geometry notes, whatever you want to use for 3D, but the key thing is like to really, really learn to observe and to see what's happening with the planet in the real world and then to bring it into, into 3D. And it's really easy to lose sight when you're working on such a project and working for really long. So another key thing is getting feedback. And that's even if you're like really detailed obsessed, but if you look for, at something for too long, you can kind of start losing the sight. And you really need this other pair of eyes to help you start seeing again. And that's, that was the role of Aaron for me. He always applied, gave super accurate feedback of little, you know, angle differences and like shape differences in the plants. And that really made the plants work so much better than if I was doing this all by myself. So thank you again, Aaron. And thanks to Julius Harling from the CEO of Grasswalt for allowing, for making this presentation with the, with their scans. And I'll mention the podcast also like run a podcast subsurface talks. If you haven't seen the lightning talks, you can, you can find it on YouTube. Hope that it works. I'll just quickly search for it and show it to you. Okay. This is one. So you can search for this channel and there are talks with interesting guests. Some of them are here in the conference. Some of them were last year. Really great blender people doing amazing stuff. And I'm always interested in talking about people doing great stuff with blender and in 3D in general. So if you want to have a chat, please let me know. We can schedule a call and record a podcast episode together. So thank you again. And the end slide.