Assignment - May - Phase 3: Flower

Time to add a nice flower to the scene! It's bright, it's colourful, it emphasises Spring... and more importantly, it's cliche.

Starting off is nice and easy. The stem is merely a cylinder tweaked with the bend tool.

The 'housing' segment of the flower is just a sphere hit heavily with the 'hemisphere' tool. But just to 'attach' it properly to the stem, it was converted to an editable mesh and pulled about a bit.

The main segment of the flower head is a flattened sphere. This one's pretty easy, isn't it?

Ah, here we go. The flower had to be awkward and just had to have petals didn't it? Do not fear, this is easier than it looks. Much like creating the dragonfly's wings, create a 'spline' using the line tool. Then using either the edit vertices or 'bones' tool, twist the petals a bit to give them more of a realistic curve/bend in them. Make one, then just clone it repeatedly, rotating and adjusting until they fit around the flower head.

With all the petals rotated into shape, it should look something like this.

A little leaf was also added to it, as a testament to my former idea (And, more importantly, visual effect!) 'Bones' tool once again helped out on this one! Though not yet textured... doesn't it still look lovely?

So let's put it in the scene! This is done with the 'merge' option, found under 'File'. The flower was saved and opened up within the current image for May. Now, it didn't arrive on the scene this cleanly. In reality, it was tiny. However, the handy 'scale' tool saved the day here. The flower was moved, grown and placed into position like so. It's a little on the dark side, but pretty much spot on.

Though the petals and stem could get away with a simple texture, the flower head needed something a lot more stylish than a giant button. The pattern of a daisy is nice. But how to achieve the near honeycomb-like style of it? Simpler than it seems! First up, a small document was opened in Photoshop and given a healthy splash of yellow. The texture was achieved all in one simple move. First up, set the main colour as a dark yellow. Under 'Filter', was the 'Mosaic Tiles' option. And that's all there is to it! The cell size was tiny, along with the border size (The light intensity was left, to brighten up the centre of the texture), and previously selecting a dark yellow colour meant that the border lines were said yellow. Job done! All that was left was to open up a blank white document of the same size, and changing the colour to black, repeat (Luckily, Photoshop temporarily remembers the last filter you did. So just hit that again, and it'll do it all for you, with all the exact settings). This ones for the bump! (The same thing used on the dragonfly's eyes and wings)

And there it is! One daisy! The yellow honeycomb map was used for the 'Diffuse', and the black and white one was used for the 'bump'. You might also notice a more 'sunny' glow on the picture. That's because I found the colour options within the lighting! Seen as these objects were to be bathed in sunlight, the colour was changed to a sunny yellow... and thus everything now has that sun-kissed look to it! Lovely! The flower also got its own spotlight, as it felt left out. Just a background map needed and that's 1 month completed!