 Yeah, I'll just start. So, is this okay? Great. So, welcome to the Holy Grail of plant creation. Or if you don't like exaggerations, 3D vegetation in blender. And before we'll start, just a few words about myself. My name is Julius Harling and I do stuff with plants in blender. Here's some of my artworks I've done over the last couple years. I also do grass fight. We call it the best way to add vegetation in blender. But it's basically just a bunch of high quality nature assets packed into an add-on that allows you to easily import them and customize them, scatter them. And just so you know, we're launching a 20% discount at the moment during the blender conference. But this workshop is not about grass fight. It's about plant creation in blender. And because we're on a tight schedule, we'll do this in six simple steps. We'll first start by shooting some reference and textures right here with those lovely mint plants. Then we'll create a very simple texture layout. After that, we'll model the individual elements of the plant in blender and assemble them to create a final plant model. Then we'll create a very basic material in the node editor and create a very, very fast but efficient particle system for the plants. And as a bonus, we'll do some very cool color variation. So let's start with the first step, texture shooting. I originally wanted to do all the different steps right in this room until I stepped in this room. Because while this room is a great room for presenting, it's not so great for texture shooting. And that's fine as this room isn't meant to be used for texture shooting. But what is great for texture shooting? It's basically very simple. We need a very, very large and very soft lighting situation. That is because we don't want any sharp reflections or shadows on our plants right here. Because Blender will calculate them inside Blender later and we don't want to have them twice. So a general basic rule of thumbs would be if you cannot see your own shadow like maybe in an overcast lighting situation where the sky is covered with lots of clouds and they work as a kind of a diffusion object, that is a very great lighting situation. If you can see your own shadow, that's not so great. So I clearly can see my own shadow here. But I'll just do some things anyways just for demo purposes and we'll use some other textures later. So we'll shoot the textures. We'll first of all shoot reference and reference images are very, very important whenever you do anything that has to do with nature, organic stuff, especially with plants because they look so weird if you take a closer look and they're so random that it's hard to replicate them without it. And then we'll shoot the textures. We'll do this relatively easy. I hope you can see my screen. If not, I'll have to... Ah, this laptop is not in the Wi-Fi yet. Let me just get to my desktop somehow and plug into the Wi-Fi. Sorry. So it's Blender right there. So and now this should work. But what we can already do is we can already focus on one plant while this is loading. So I'll just grab this so you can see me and hear me. Let's just get, I don't know, any plant like this one. And when shooting reference images we want to focus on four main points. We want to focus on the shape of the leaf which you sadly can't see up close because this is not working currently. Let me try it again. Let me use this in trial mode. Perfect. And now let's try it again. Okay, the Wi-Fi isn't working as planned. So I'll just demonstrate it right here. So we want to make sure that we capture the surface of the leaf. We want to make sure we capture how the leaf and the stem are connected because that can vary from plant to plant. And we want to make sure to capture also the top part here where the young leaves are coming from because that looks different than kind of the normal plant. And now I would go ahead and show you how I shoot textures. But I can't, but that's not a big deal. I just use my crappier live phone and it works. I use the HDRI mode and I try to have an offset of about three seconds maybe so I don't, when I click on the Make Photo button, it doesn't move my phone and the result gets blurry and not sharp. So it's really, really easy. You want to lay them out somewhere and make sure that they are flat. I hope everyone can basically see this or it's not so hard to imagine. And take a photo with a good lighting setup and then you want to cut them out in Photoshop for your texture and that is basically the next step what we will be doing here. So creating the texture layout with Photoshop. And first of all we'll position our images on the canvas, our different parts. Then we'll create a basic shading map. This shading map is basically just the normal map with the normal lighting because we're using a semi-PBR workflow. We don't have scanned data here but we want to maintain this shading information there if we want to generate a normal map later on or a bump map or other PBR maps because there's more information in this than in an Albedo or a color map where all lighting and shadow is being removed which we'll do after that. We'll also add transparency right inside of the color map and then we'll go and create a translucency map. Now the translucency map is kind of the color of a leaf that you can see when the light shines through. You can see that. That's the color that we are aiming for. You could do that in Blender as well but we have a bit more options in Photoshop. So let's just jump right inside. We have this nice canvas. This is just 2K. And put that in. I hope you can hear me. And I have these images here loaded. This is just the texture that I shot. So we have a stem and two leaves. We won't be able to get more. And I'll just copy them and paste them very easily right on here. So it's not a huge deal, not very hard. And what I did here was I shot the whole texture and I tried to have all the elements in one image because we want to make sure that we have a relative that the size of these elements is correct and we don't have some leaves that are bigger relative to the others because first of all that will give us problems with textile density. And second of all, the more important part in my opinion is that that makes it harder for us later on to find the right sizes of the leaf and doing it this way we have a really nice representation of how the actual sizes are. Now, this is really nice. I'll just save it as text shading. This is our shading map.png. And so this is really not hard. Everyone can do this. Now let's go to our next step which is adding the color or creating the color map. The first thing we'll do is we'll add transparency to our leaf so I'm just merging those leaves and selecting them and then we want some kind of margin around this. Use the selection, modify, expand 50 pixels. That's the wrong way. Let's try it again. Select, modify, expand 50 pixels. And now we can just add this to the background and we have added transparency around it. We don't want transparency around our stem so we'll be modeling it as a full object with volume. Because of that, we still don't want a green border. Right now it's on a green background and we don't want that. So what we'll do is we can just duplicate the stem and below our stem layer we can blur our selected, our stem layer. And with that we can just extrude it, duplicate it sometimes, repeat the step and we get a really nice kind of extrusion around it. And that way we don't have this green border and that's very important if you zoom out and otherwise you can see those arrows. So now we want to get to our color and we want to remove the shading that is on our leaf. And the way to do this, really easy, we have this image adjustment here in Photoshop and it's called shadows and highlights. And we'll just click on that and you can see here we can adjust the amount of shadows that should be reduced in highlights. Now I suggest you don't go too overkill with it. Sometimes that can give you some problems with your texture but this is fine, actually in this case. And still we see it's really bluish. That's because I shot these images on a kind of a bluish sky. And what you have to keep in mind, plants normally are more, way more reddish and orange than you would think. You always think, or the eye thinks that everything is a bit more towards the blue side and if you actually check this with a color corrected image with these color checkers for example, then you'll notice that they're actually much more orange. So I'll just reduce kind of the amount of blue in here and you can already see it gets really nice and de-highlight or delit. And we'll do the same for our stem here, just image adjustments, shadows and highlights. And getting rid of some of the shadows we don't want it too light like this, that works. And now we can use this as our color map. So just save it, save it, don't shave it, text color.png as png file of course. And there we go. And now the third step, which is the translucency. And we don't need the alpha here anymore. You could also by the way create your own, create your own opacity mask. I'll just do it inside the color map because that's just a lot simpler and faster. Now for the translucency what we want is, we want it to be a lot brighter because light is shining through and we want it to be a little more reddish because when you observe it the color is not really green but more of a green orange when you look at the translucency color. So we'll just grab a leaf here and we'll go inside our curves and we'll make them a lot brighter like this. And we'll also increase a red, something like this. Now you don't want these red lines here but for now I'll just leave it like that. You can always tweak, do some more tweaks but I don't have the time here. And for this, the stem, the stem has a volume so the light can't pass through as easily as with for example a leaf. So we want to make sure that the color of the translucency on the stem is very very dark because in a translucency map not only means color, color but the value means the intensity of translucency. If we have a dark pixel that means in this pixel we'll get almost no translucency. So I'll just use maybe this. You can use whatever you want. I'll just use this exposure here and create a clipping mask so it only affects the stem and we'll just move the exposure down. And we can see right here we have a green spot here that is actually a leaf. We can maybe mask this out if we want to. Here. Mask it out. Maybe make it a little more smooth. But these are just adjustments. You can tweak, as I said, you can tweak as much as you want. But this for now, this should be fine. Intex, translucency.png and we saved all our maps. So, perfect. So, let me just check. What did we do? We created the texture. We positioned the elements on the canvas. We created a shading map for other PBR maps. For example, a roughness map. We created the color maps. Remember plans are orange and we added some margin for transparency and we created the translucency part. In general, I would always suggest add more leaves. I only added two because we don't have much time here. But add five, six green leaves, maybe some dead leaves, maybe some really, really fresh and young leaves for formal realism. That is creating the texture layout. The third step is modeling the individual elements. And we'll do that with Blender. First of all, we'll start creating the 2D shape. And there are two main aspects that we have to keep in mind here. The first one is minimal transparency and good topology. And what do I mean with that? Minimal transparency. So, when most people model a leaf, they make their lives fairly easy. Like this. Except they don't. Because when modeling a plant like this with that much, with just a single plane, there are huge amounts of transparency. And the way that works is that the shader will calculate the whole part, the whole face first, and it will calculate the translucency, the reflections, the diffusion, and other fancy stuff you added. And then afterwards, the transparency shader will just hide those things. It won't tell the other shaders to stop calculating where the transparency will hide things. Plus, transparency on its own is quite expensive. So, this, using less transparency is actually the way to go, even if that comes with the cost of some more polygons. This is actually more optimized than the left one. And that leads us also, to our next point, good topology. Let me just check out those two leaves. With topology, by the way, I mean the size, flow, and organization cases. And we can see the left one looks not as good as the right one. And this is, besides some minor differences, especially because of the shading. You can see we have some major shading issues there, like right on the left. And if we check out the topology, we'll see why that is the fact. Because on the left side, we have mostly triangles, and they're really, really thin, really stretched. Mostly quads, and they're more evenly spaced. And they also follow the natural lines. For example, here this edge follows the, I think it's called mid-rip, the middle part of the leaf. And if we look at the amount of polygons, we can actually see that the left one has far more vertices than the right one. So, having a good topology may also save you some more polygons, which you can then spend on creating more detail to a leaf. So, these two points are important. And after we've done this, after we've created the 2D shape, we'll add some 3D elements. So, let's jump right into Blender. There we go. And I'll just, first of all, I'll just add in a background image. And we'll use our, I think it's saved in here, we'll use our color. And now, we'll start creating the 2D shape. And the shape that resembles the leaf most is a plane. So, let's just add in a plane and scale it down. And let's start modeling. This is basic, basic stuff, basic poly modeling. I'll just try and make this align with the stem. We don't need transparency for the stem so much as it has a very straight edge. But now here you can see me actually working on the shape. And you can see I'm trying to have the border, the outside border as small as possible for our, so we have very, very little amount of transparency here. And, yeah, I'm going over this. I'm trying to have the faces relatively evenly sized. But this is really, really simple. I mean, everyone can do this. This is really not hard. And once we've made this, check here the edges. And once you've made this, we can just add in a loop cut. And we'll align the loop cut as well with the natural lines of the leaf. And we have our first 2D shape. Now, let me just unwrap this. And we can just do this by using the project from view unwrapping method. Works really nice. And if we jump into the UV image, the UV editor, that's what it's called today. We can just align it. And I really like to use the, in this case, 2D cursor to do this. It's a really great and powerful tool for lots of stuff. And we'll use it more in a second. Now, this is our basic UV. And we can actually check this out if we go to model and, oops, texture here. And I just prepared this little preview material with just just an image texture. And if we select our color here, then we can see that's how it looks. And we get a leaf. Very nice. Now, normally I would just redo everything again. But for this, as we are a little bit in a hurry, I'll just duplicate this and maybe mirror it and reuse this part. And I'll do this with the help of the nice proportional editing tool, which is really great for everything organic. Because it allows you to move more than one vertex. And with your mouse scroll, you can actually change the fall of how much the area that gets influenced by it. And here we have our stem. And I'll just try to line those things up like this. And maybe we don't need, oops, maybe we don't need all of these. Because this is a little low. Now I apparently broke this one part, but that doesn't really matter. Then we just fill it in. Oops. Like this. And we made sure everything aligns nicely. And we'll just unwrap it again. And make sure it aligns this. Select everything and scale it down. And it's very rough, but it works. Now we have our two leaves set up. Let's go to the stem. And we'll do the exact same thing with the stem. We'll add in a plane that we'll add in right here. And we'll start modeling. And now you have to keep in mind that a stem is a very complex structure. It's not just like a cylinder that's just growing up. Because actually what the stem does is it allows plants to grow leaves right out of it. So there are some nodes. There are some other structures that allow leaves to grow and to connect with each other. Or there are some other stems that are growing out of the stem. And depending on how much time you have and how much realism you want in detail. Following the outline if you have a nice clean cut out of your texture. But that is just basically really easy. It's just a lot of work. And you can see now I'm here. I'm not going too close on the face as I could also do something like this so that they are more evenly spaced. But we don't really need that. Just make sure that you don't have too few details because that will give you some problems when you want to transform the stem or maybe have an animation with wind or something. Yes but basically I'm just following the lines here. Very, very easy stuff. And we're almost done with this. Just take a look here. Okay. And now when we come to the end what we can actually see is that there's a little leaf at the top. And I left it there because one thing that's hard with creating plants is the connection that organically grows or that existed organically between leaf and stem. And we solve this by sticking leaves into the stem later on but having something like this where the leaf is inside like growing from the stem and you have it as a texture that is good to use. Now I feel like here we could maybe add some more maybe add some more detail like this. And now I'm just going to model this leaf. We could have added some transparency here but we don't really have to. And this looks fine. So I'm not going to spend too much detail on this. You can if you want to. And now let's go in for some depth but before that let's also try and unwrap this. The same way we did with the rest. The stem is basically very, very similar to the leaf and the good thing is if we added these details here we now have some visual anchors to know if things lined up or not. And you can spend more time on lining those up but I'll just leave it like this. So and now let's add some 3D to it which is what we originally wanted to do. Let me just give this the preview material as well. And let's add some 3D. Let's add in a loop cut right in the middle. And let's move it upwards. And we can first of all see that our shading is a little messed up so let's go and shade smooth. I wonder why this isn't the default in Blender. But anyway, what we can now do let me just check if because sometimes your proportional editing tool can mix this up let me now add in a mirror modifier and I'd like to use the Z and now you can see wow, we have a volume, we have a stem. Although the stem looks a bit like a cube so let me just bevel this a little bit like this maybe and this and now we have a nice stem. And one more thing we added these details right here and let me just delete the background we don't need it anymore and let us also try and add in those details in our model because otherwise we'll have a model of a stem that will look great from one side and completely flat from another and I'll just really really roughly add in those details here to have these nodes and this will also later on help us when we are placing our leaves on the stem. Yeah, maybe another one here and now we have to make sure that clipping is enabled if we want to do changes like this but that looks fine and let's just add this one here as well and we can of course spend as much time as we want tweaking this but basically with everything it's the same spend more time, get more quality and so we have our 2D elements here. Let's take a look at what we did we created the 2D shape and then we added some 3D to it but I just realized of course we only did it for the stem sorry, I forgot to do it for the leaves so let's do this right now we'll just select the individual part and we can give it some depth here or we can just select the whole loop, give it some depth and now here comes reference. Reference is always important and it is important here as well. If we take a look at the reference I showed earlier, we can see that these leaves are really really flat but the stems are actually moving upwards. I can show it here, this one, the leaf is flat but the stem is moving upwards and we want to add that to our leaf model as well so what we can do is we can select our stem right there and we can rotate it, oops of course we have to select all of our stem, we can just rotate it and move it around and let me just always check if we have kind of the right amount this might be a nice image to check or this one right there it is so the margin here is not as big, let me just try and align this and so these are the parts that are relatively boring modeling, tweaking, fixing but these are actually the parts that are very very important because they are your guarantees for realism only if you spend time tweaking and looking at reference again and again and again and again you will get something that will look great. Now this is very very basic here but it should work let's just maybe give it some rotation by using again using the the falloff tool like this. Okay that's fine and maybe give it a little more depth and we'll do the same thing for this one here as well. Now this is a small leaf that's growing on the top of the plant right there, let me just it's one of those here and we can see they have much more depth so we'll add much more depth down here give it more depth even more maybe and we can select individual vertices here and give it some variants. Now you can always add some more stuff and it will only the model will only benefit because nature is random it doesn't follow it follows certain rules but nothing like all leaves are the same so kind of just varying them a little helps a lot and here again we want to give it this the same similar shape maybe something like this and maybe maybe we also want to increase the stem size here a little and we can do it like this and that works fine. Now let's go let's go back to our presentation so we created the 2D shape and then after that we made some we gave it some depth by checking the references and you can always create more variation use the same texture duplicate it change the adjustments that you make to have much more variation I just don't have enough time so the fourth step is creating the plant model we'll first align the origins then we'll create the base components we'll break down and we'll create basic models sub models for each base components that will make it easier for us later on and faster because we can reuse these elements over and over again we'll always check the reference because that's just the way to go if you want to make it realistic and then we'll assemble all these models together into the final 3D model let me just get some starts hurting so this part is the most probably the most crucial most important one in getting the right amount of detail and realism but it's also the most boring one to watch because I'll be tweaking stuff over and over again and it will always take longer for the first time or the first new plant species that you're doing and although I rehearse this and I want to do it as fast as I can I can't promise anything I'll try to make it really really fast let's start by aligning the origins this is important for the placement later on and the easiest way is to select and vertex click cursor to select and then object set origin to 3D cursor and we'll do this for this leaf as well cursor to select and origin set origin to 3D cursor like this and let me just move them away the same for our stem this one is actually working nicely and so we just go back base components is the next step and we'll start with the base components for the leaves let me just duplicate this leaf I always duplicate objects so I have kind of a backup in case I miss things mess things up and if we take a look at the structure again and we can see that the way these plants grow is by they are having some kind of pairs of leaves two leaves that are always kind of growing like this and then kind of a little higher they are always rotating about 90 degrees and then again and again and we'll try to replicate the structure and these details are really what make the difference so if you have the right kind of anatomy in your plant or not and I'll just replicate this by duplicating this but first let me go and check this out this looks nice let me just give it a little more little more height and maybe a little more length here we could add in another loop cut and move adjust this accordingly and like this and let me just duplicate this rotate it about 180 degrees and you could use another leaf model but I'm just reusing this one as that's the only thing I have here and still we can try and make these less repetitive or look the same we can rotate it give it a little bit of if you hit R twice you actually can rotate it in a really nice way not around what you see but I don't know how to describe it but it is really cool and also what I like to do is using the 3D cursor now you probably have read it I use left click select because that allows me to use the 3D cursor more effectively I don't have to swap the tools here all the time I can just with my left click position the 3D cursor and then with my right click let me position it here for example I can select a model and if we're here in 3D cursor I can rotate the plant just around the 3D cursor and that gives me a huge flexibility that I won't have otherwise and we can maybe rotate this a little to the top just an example and this is our first base element it's that easy this is our first structure now the second structure that is a little different is the top of the plant if we take a look at this you can see the leaves are not only getting smaller I wish I had my phone here so I could show it but the leaves are not only getting smaller but they're also changing their size changing the way they're curled and we'll try to replicate that let me just add in use this small leaf here because that's exactly what it is and let me check our reference again a good reference for this would for example be this one here if we zoom in a little you can see there's this middle leaf here and then we have this leaf that's growing out of it and this leaf and we'll try and replicate this so let's start by actually using the 3D cursor again we can rotate those a little to make sure that they are straight like this and give them a little bit more depth maybe as well so just selecting those and moving them in it has a lot more depth and if we feel like there's not enough detail for example here we can just give it a bevel that's okay I mean those extra vertices won't kill us they're also a little slimmer so I'll just do that and I'll just duplicate it and just make sure that they align make sure that they look a little different maybe this one is rotated like this or it's actually not that much rotated up so maybe it's just a little more like this and we can move them in a little and that is fine now around this we have another set of leaves and just got individual origins again and of course we want to keep the rotation so we now have to go 90 degrees off because the other leaves were positioned like this and if we check our reference again then we can see that this leaf in the middle is very very very small so let me just scale them down accordingly and now this leaf is kind of covering it like a jacket maybe and it's also a little smaller but it's covering the other leaf let me just therefore move this in a little and it looks a little more like this and we can it has like a curvy thing so let me get it up and try and get that shape here as well and the 3D cursor is just perfect for this you can see here it gives us huge flexibility and again if this is not enough what am I doing if this is not enough detail get in a bevel that's okay and it is also again not as it's a lot slimmer so let me just adjust this and the more detail you put in your basic elements like we do here the better it will look in the end so we'll just reuse this and try and make these work really covering the young leaves because that's their function in nature anyway protecting the freshly grown leaves or I guess would make sense give it a little variation maybe change the rotation a little not too much and we always want to make sure that our changes that we give to the model are not too drastic because if you will be duplicating the model over and over again a particle system those really really strong changes will show they won't maybe show in the model but they will show in the shading if you have the same sharp reflection over and over again in a certain pattern it's still but generic enough so we can scatter them now this looks fine maybe adding some more height here but this is okay now I still feel like these two here are way too large so I'm just going to size them down and I'm going to check my reference they're still too large so I'm going to do something like this oops and this whole thing is very large let's scale it down and now we're starting with these leaves here right there they are we can use this pair here already and we'll just move them in and scale them down and of course change their rotation align align and there again kind of working as a cover a little bit so we'll size them down as well and maybe we can get rid of this this line here so you have your base models and you're free to edit and destroy them as much as you want really that's what they are there for and in our case that really helps us here and I feel like the leaves on the top are maybe not as long maybe they're a little more roundish so we can change that with the tools we have and make sure they don't look the same maybe scale this one down a little using the 3D cursor and also maybe rotating it a little just because plants are there's never a perfect angle and now this is our first kind of element for a second element for the top here tweak this and tweak the size and check reference again and again but you can do that at home as much as you want I'll just carry on with the third thing, oops that is the stem and I'll just duplicate it as well and rotate it so it fits everything and maybe something like this looks fine this is modeling the base components while checking reference now the final part assembling the final model we'll start with our stem here and we'll just give it some rotation you can see on the one axis because we generated it with the mirror modifier it's still completely flat and we can use our different rotation tools to just add this a little bit shape a little and I like to rotate it from the top as well because that gives us kind of this maybe not as much you can experiment with a 3D cursor it gives you great results and rotating it from the top gives you an effect like the plant that's actually growing towards the sunlight and maybe like circle-like shape so that is great now let's start adding our different elements it's going to be very easy because we already modeled them and let's start with our young our young leaf here and let's just place it right there exactly and we can see it's maybe a little too too big or I feel like this one here this leaf here is too big now originally what I wanted to do is I wanted to make this flat I'm just going to merge those two to make this flat as a single plane but I forgot to do this here so we'll just use this as a come on 3D object but what we can do is we can make it a lot smaller just the individual leaf here and maybe making it a little thinner like this why isn't this working alright like this and now what we'll do is we'll try to align these here maybe scaling this up a little bit and of course we want to make sure that this feels naturally so we want to make sure that these different elements are not really sticking in and we can use the connected only fall of just move the individual parts like this and again that's what I said this is really the stuff that needs the most attention and that is not very interesting but it is important for creating realistic nature I think for every aspect not only for plants and now we can start with the rest of the leaves so we know these are rotated this way so we want to add the next row anyway so we maintain the structure and I'll just align it we have these nice little knots here like this and now we know the size we already talked about this the size was correct for these leaves and I'm resizing this now because the leaves that I shot were actually larger leaves from down here and the leaves on the top are usually very very small then after that they get really really big that's like look we are the best comes older smaller smaller leaves so this is kind of fine I'll just adjust this a little bit but that's okay and we'll duplicate the leaves again rotate them make sure you have median point enabled otherwise they will rotate just around each other because we have two elements selected and adjust it with the next knot which is this one we need to scale them down a lot maybe just a little but not too much that is fine and do the same thing again see this works perfectly and we'll just add it to the next knot and you can see actually having this detail in the stem is very important when you shoot it and also when you model it because it's your basic representation and orientation where the leaves should be and we'll do this again just one more time and align it but first of all let's rotate it 90 degrees and align this here we already had that here align this here and right now maybe we can scale them down just a little and do it again for the next one but maybe for the next one there's only one leaf because the other one got broken down you never know and we'll just add this here and it's kind of pointing towards the ground because it's already a little old and maybe just as a small little nice detail on the last one here we have just a normal small leaf that is just waiting to die very small like this now the plant and the natural feel of this lives from all these single details that you put in there that you observe now we didn't check our reference that much as we probably should but then it would have taken us even longer checking how do these leaves really grow how is their orientation they edit them here and we'll just give them a little bit of variation just so they don't all look as repetitive and we'll start by changing the orientation or the rotation based on where they are located so leaves that are on the top usually are rotated just a little bit towards the top and using the 3D cursor here is just great it really helps us have that control that we need and maybe this one here is a little smaller because I don't know whatever it's nature it's random and give it maybe this kind of bending and you can see that we're kind of missing out detail here it's not smooth anymore and I'll just add this by hand and here we can also just give it a little bit of rotation maybe a little bit of rotation like this come on and now you can spend as much time as you want detailing this and the more you detail this the more detail and also variation you'll get you can duplicate these steps and create even more plans I'll just do one model here but the more the more plans of course you create the less repetition you have and the more realism therefore you'll get and just some basic things you can also get go a little more crazy but this is fine for me so we have our base model now let me just select everything and merge it into one model and yes there we have it so we align all origins good job and we created the base components and this was really crucial for adding them together very fast and left click select here just works better at least for me because you're much more effective a lot faster and detail detail detail check the reference always especially if you're looking at the structure and the alignment of the leaf pairs and assemble then everything together and add some height and variation now you can spend more time tweaking but I'll just go to the next step creating the material and that's very easy we'll talk about the base shader the base elements of a plant material and we'll talk a bit about normal versus bump and then we'll do some very very small tweaks now if we just check out the base material here we have the following components we have a principled shader which does the diffusion job and the reflection job and this is being added together with a transparency shader which does the translucency job now translucency itself is not really a physically accurate shader because basically what it would be is subsurface scattering but that's not supported in blender right now for 2D sorry for 2D shapes so using translucency and adding it together is fine in this case it looks okay and we'll mix that with a transparency shader and we'll use the alpha of our texture as the factor as that alpha will be the transparency masked out and we'll use of course our color for the color and we'll use our translucency let me just check this it's probably here translucency we'll use our translucency for the color of the translucency and we'll have to add the color text color here as well now before we add in the bump or anything like that just let me talk about normal versus bump what is better now both add a little bit of bumpiness and detail to your material this for example is an image of a stinging nettle model normal material but no bump or normal applied this is the same thing but with bump with a strength of 0.5 and now now we have a normal map applied within intensity of 1 and you can definitely see the differences right away the bump map gives you a lot of high frequency very small and fine detail but if you increase it too much too fast then you'll get something that looks very very flat and like a paper look you can't go above that you can't add more like medium or low frequency details that's where the normal map comes in you have all the low frequency details you can really give the plant more structure with the normal map the problem is normal maps are a little harder to create and you can't do it inside of blender but having a normal map and maybe generating it with I don't know crazy bump or any other software by using our shading map works very very well and then maybe if you want you can add the bump on top of it but just very small or in our case we'll just use the bump because we don't have a normal map and hope that it looks okay so let me just get in our shading map here and we'll plug that into the bump and I've had some issues with this during the last time I tested this so let's let's check it out and this works but I want to be in cycles and it works as well now you can see the bump is really really strong but it doesn't give us a lot of depth but of course the bump or the normal goes into the normal socket here let me just show it to you and here and if we now preview our material we should get something that looks relatively nice let me add just some lighting here and it looks it looks fine now I still feel like the bump is too much if we look at this we will go closer it looks almost like metal so this is with no bump it looks a little more like a leaf but it also lacks some detail so using a low strength here might be perfect but not too much so this is fine now we could tweak this more but I think we're running a little bit out of time so I'm not going to do that you could tweak the color tweak the amount of translucency by just decreasing the color but I'll just leave it like this so what did we do we created the material with the base shaders and stay close to the ground just simple shaders are usually the best because it doesn't get too messy it will look good they're not as expensive they won't render as long always use normal maps if you can or use bump if you can add it on top or if you don't have anything else and tweak as much as you want but yeah it's less messy to tweak elements individually and so in Photoshop for example not in the node editor so creating the particle system that is really really simple and really cool we'll add a plane we'll add a particle system we'll select the plant and we'll hide the repetition and let me just do this real quick let's go to solid view let's add in a plane maybe scale it up a little bit go here under context particles and add in a particle system change it to hair advanced and under render we can select render as object now if you have multiple objects you would put them in a collection and say render as collection but we're rendering it as object and we can just select our object and you can see right away there we have it now first of all the size is a bit off so let's increase this right below maybe 0.24 gives us an equal size and it will look really bad first of all because we have a thousand mint plants on there which is ridiculous so let's go to 0.22 and still it will look really bad because kind of the rotation is off now in Blender you want to go to the side view and then rotate it 90 degrees on the y-axis and apply this as a rotation and then the rotation will straighten up I have no idea why it is like this maybe some wise developer can tell me but that's just how it works now for our randomization the random scale right below render right here and we don't want to go too high because then we'll get some plant models that are really really tiny they won't show on your render but they still have the same amount of polygons so you don't want that but maybe 0.5, 0.6 is fine and now here comes the magic let's go to velocity let's we have here this randomize button right here and just enable it Chuck almost no repetition visible you can go higher but then it will get really crazy so this is fine you can maybe edit give it a little more here and we can also enable rotation and change the face so the way it's rotating on the z-axis and maybe also the random randomize the face and we can maybe change the orientation to different things we could scroll through them and we get different different things but I'd like to use the normal tangent and then we can use this randomize maybe to get something that looks more like these random growing mint plants and if we take a look at it now we can actually see it looks really nice now let's enable the lighting and maybe decrease the HRI and we'll get plants that look really nice and in my opinion there's too much translucency there I would tweak that you can do it for example in Photoshop by changing just the brightness making it darker but that's what we did we created the particle system we kind of decreased the amount of repetition very very easy and in general you can be creative you can use textures for length and distribution in particle system settings you can mix different patterns and you can use different values that are in the settings most of them are really great just experiment with them for example also with children now before we ending just a little bonus color variation here comes the cool and the good stuff we'll use the awesome object info node we'll add some individual variation and then we'll go and do some clumping now I'll hurry because I'm probably almost already way over time I hope that is okay but let me I don't want to hide this let me just select our plant and let me tell you about the object info node real quick add object info there it is it has a location vector which looks like this and it has some index things and it has a random vector a value and then random value assigns every instance with a random value and we can use this really really nicely for masking for example if we mix this just with a mix RGB node in our color and we set this to something like soft light you can try all of them and maybe we have to put this on top then we can see that actually darker values darker values are getting darker the plants are getting darker and higher values the plants are getting lighter and you can change with the slider the amount of randomness that you want really really cool you can use this for all sorts of different things and masking several effects but I'll just keep going and do the next cool thing which is some clamping let's use any texture you could even use an image or an image texture I'm just going to use a noise texture and we can plug in the location vector into the vector of the noise texture and if we preview this now we can see not the noise texture being projected on each plant individually but on all of them and if we maybe use a color ramp we can visualize this even more maybe just something low 0.2 and increasing the effect we can see we're getting clumps right there just have to take a look at this oops like this and we're getting some awesome clumping effects here we could scale this up a little so you can see it better but this is really great and you can use this in a lot of different ways for example changing mixing another color with this like mix or color sorry color and making this maybe making this maybe a brown kind of color using this as the factor and if we plug in this one in the color we can see we have some kind of aging or dryness effect and of course we could tweak the color we could tweak the mask we could tweak all of this but that's basically how it's done and it's really cool I created the color variation using the infer object node it's really really great use it for everything that has something to do with masking and the clumping as well so that's basically it thanks for listening if you like what I did just follow me everywhere and I'll upload all the files to google drive I wanted to paste it in here but I forgot so I'll upload all the files on the drive and make sure that you'll get the link and check out all the things yourself have an awesome blender conference