Nodevember 2022

Horsetail

Prompt: *Extraterrestrial relic*

This species was good example to explore radial arrays with the *Duplicate Elements* Node. Which retains high control over size and randomization of arrays along the main shoot. 

Easily manageable Falloffs, utilizing *Float Curve* make this setup highly customizable.

Equisetum is a ‘living fossil’, the only living genus of the entire subclass ‘Equisetidae’, which for over 100 million years was much more diverse and dominated the understorey of late Paleozoic forests.

(Quote Wikipedia)

Prompt: *Psychedelic Alley*

A small, flowering succulent from South Africa, I found amongst the list of psychotropic plants.

As for all of these plants created during this project, I set up a High Poly close-up preset, and a more Low Poly preset for later use in actual scenery. A Boolean value toggles between those quickly.

I like to recreate plants, which can be found and collected in my garden. If such luxury isn't available, I resort to other resources, such as specialized books, worldfloraonline.org or just Wikipedia.

Here's the reference I used for this:

Chickweed

Prompt: *Space Junkyard*

This was the first prompt of the challenge, and it already required a bit botanic creativity to find a plant for. 

Chickweed was my choice since it has 'star' in it's name, and grows like junk.

Obvious right? 

Other then going for *full procedural madness*, I wanted to create more user-friendly assets this year. Curve Objects are often a good approach to retain a lot control over a procedural setup like this. 

Using curves responsively in the Viewport, helps to manually work around otherwise edgy parts of the anatomy. Like creating the main-branching behavior. Ultimately this yields better results quicker.

Cape Sundew

Prompt: *Brutal Machinery*

A carnivorous plant from South Africa, which wraps its sticky tentacles around its prey.

With this species I've hit certain limitations, for which I had to find a workaround. 

When looking at references, the tentacle distribution isn't all random. But spaced in a certain pattern, more dense at the sides. I assume, this helps it to catch insects.

Poisson Disk alone was lacking those. To work around, I isolated the edges of the leaves, to instance more tentacles there. Not the perfect solution, but might already trick a not botanic-savvy eye.

To recreate the optical properties of the tentacles, I've mainly driven the Shader with the IOR of the 'Fresnel Node' and bit of noise. With an Attribute from Geo-nodes, the position where the desired effect appears is tuned in - increasingly strong at the tips.

Red Mangrove (young)

Prompt: *Oceanic Wonder*

Mangroves! Because it's an important coastal ecosystem and breeding place for fish.

First, I created a procedural Leaf-Shader, baked it down in a couple variations, and assembled them as atlas with Blender's Compositor - to keep it mostly nodes.

The cutout of leaf-cards/meshes, as an exception was quickly done manually, in order to focus on the actual tree.

The main root structure, was generated with *Shortest Path*. 

Additional clean-up operations consolidate the redundant geometry, which is resulting from the application of previous.

On top of that comes simple branching and elevated air-roots. Finally I scattered the mangroves characteristic seeds around, emerging it better with the environment.