Making a Good Looking Plant

You need some experience on Photoshop in addition to 3d max to follow this tutorial. The procedure I am using may not be directly applicable for every plant. In such you are free to modify the procedure.

Take some photographs of the plant you are going to model in 3d max. It is not a must, but better to have some reference materials to make it more realistic. I have chosen the following plant.

Take some photographs of its leaves. 3-4 leaves may enough, but if the plant you are modeling is the main object of your seine, take more photographs from different leaves.

Important –

1. Hold the camera directly facing to the leaf
2. Don’t use the flash, use the ambient light
3. Don’t let the object to expose to direct sun light while take photographs

Take the photo to Photoshop and clear out everything other than the leaf. Save the picture (leaf_1_diffuse). Fill the leaf from pure white and background from pure black. Save the picture in a different name (leaf_1_opacity). Repeat it to other leaves and save them in different names.

Go to 3d max and press M to open the Material Editor. Rename the material as leaf 1. Turn on 2-sided in Shader Basic Parameters rollout. Go to Maps rollout; add leaf_1_diffuse.jpg as Dimffuse colour map and leaf_1_opacity.jpg as Opacity map.

Click the leaf_1_diffuse.jpg button and turn on the Show Maps in Viewport button just below the material slots. Go back to parent level and turn on the Show Maps in Viewport button again. Prepare the 2-3 more maps for other leaves by following the same procedure.

Go to top viewport and create a plane with the length and width equal to the size of the map (or any other size by maintaining length to width ratio same to maps using). Set the Length and Width Segments as 4 and 2 respectively. Apply the prepared material to the plane.

Convert plane to Editable Poly and turn on Preserve UVs option in the Edit Geometry rollout. Go to Vertex sub-object level and place middle vertex row on the centre line of the leaf. Move other vertices until the poly object just covering the area of the leaf.

Select middle raw of vertices and move little bit downwards, and make the leave curve through its length. In addition to this you are free to do any modification to poly object to make it unique. Render and see how it looks like.

Repeat the same procedure to make some more leaves using the other maps prepared. I have prepared 4 such leaves.

Go to front viewport and create 10-12 lines with 5-10 vertices each.

Go to vertex mode and deviate the positions of vertices from Left viewport to make them more random.

Go to top viewport and rotate the lines to different axis.

Select one line and go to Gendering rollout and turn on Renderable, Generate Mapping Coordinates and Display Render Mesh. Change the Thickness as the amount you want and set the No of Sides to 6 or 8. Attach all the other lines to it.

Prepare a suitable map for the brunches and apply it to line object. Increase the tiling as you like. Render and see the result. This is what I prefer.

Take some copies and mirror object from the leaves already made. Go to Vertex sub-object level and edit them a bit to make the unique. Place them around the lines using move and rotate options with snap.

Place few more copies of leaves around the branches to make it more realistic.

This is how my final bush looks like.

Hope you will enjoy this tutorial. Please let me know if you have faces any difficulties while following this tutorial. I would like to help you.