I started up blender again a couple days ago, and was working on a concept I had. A keyhole, very old, slightly overgrown with vines. Here’s what I’ve got so far:
The main problem I’m having is with the dupliframes that I used to create the leaves on the vine on the right. As you can see, the leaves on the upper side of the vine are not staying on the vine! Some of them float above it. The only way to get the upper leaves stay close to the vine in ALL places where it follows the vine’s path is to move the source leaf to be right above the source leaf of the bottom set of leaves… (was that clear?) …Anyway, has anyone ever had that problem before? Maybe I don’t understand dupliframes properly…
[edit] there is still much to be done. no need to comment on textures, lighting etc… as I am not even done modelling.
hmm… if that is the amount of leafs you are going to have… or even close to it, I suggest you just model them all, instead of dupliverting… you get individual leafs, and you can tweak them to look all a bit different…
agree with basse. you can make the whole vine srtaight… tweak the leafs… joining them all, uv mpping and than use curve deforme to give the vine his curl form and use hooks to give the leafs random feeling.
The problem with modelling them all is… well I get bored and lose patience easily. Dupliframes is good because It was very fast and easy. just adjust the curve if I’m not happy with it, and the leaves follow the curve too! with mesh-modelling, I’d either have to move the vine segment by segment, or use some kind of armature setup - hey THERE’S an idea… hmmm…
The curve deformation looks like it would be helpful. Any idea when 2.35 will appear (within a month or two, 3 or 4, 6? or just some weeks?) or I guess I could just go and download the latest test version that has it. Where would I get this version?
…and I’m still puzzled by the dupliframes behaviour.
The lower set of leaves follows fine. On the upper set, yeah the first 2 or 3 are the only ones that do it properly.
I added the Bevel object before I added the leaves. I will have to try removing the Bevel and the leaves and creating the vine in reverse order (leaves then Bevel), and if that doesn’t work, I may send the .blend. But first I’m going out for a bit.
I’m not sure if I know what I’m talking about, I’m pretty new with this. But maybe you could make the vine straight, duplivert the leaves like you want, make it all real and join everything, then apply the curve. It might give the effect your looking for without having to model all the leaves.
I was able to fix it, eventually. It involved adjusting the dupliframe offsets a bit, and MAJOR tweaking of the curve. a couple of the corners were a bit too “sharp”, and so the leaves didn’t follow the path properly. It’s all better now, more or less.
I’ll post the latest image when I get home tonight.
Little update. I got rid of the big chunky vine and added a more graceful vine with more detail… and berries! yum!
Here’s a close up:
I know some of them intersect with the keyhole mesh. I plan to convert these to REAL meshes (it’s all dupliframe right now) and then adjust them manually. But the reason I’m still using dupliframes is I’m still not happy with it completely… any comments?
Kansas: the small leaves look like spears? yeah, a bit… I actually have a vine in my living room with heart-shaped sort of leaves… that was my model for the little leaves, but the vine for the real one is different.
Desoto: yeah I COULD use leaf pics on a plane… but the original concept is a very large image of the keyhole (larger than currently rendered… probably wallpaper size or bigger?) so the leaves would be quite large, and the detail on them is important… which is also the reason I’m not just using 6 faces. I want lots of detail! the problem is this is going to be a very complex mesh when I’m done. oh well…
but the whole reason I posted was to get feedback on the leaf-berry objects. no one has anything to say?
The problem is that they’re very “spoon-shaped”. They all have this very concave shape to them and its a bit distracting because the orientation of the leaves isn’t exactly what you’d expect. The “twigs” are nice however. Once its textured all will be well
small update: added creepers to the big vine along the bottom.
The creepers aren’t dupliframes, they were positioned with dupliframe but then each mesh was modified.
Its too obvious that the leaves and berries are duplicated. It gives the render an unnatural appearnace which is the opposite of what you’re going for. I believe you might have more like duplicated with SHIFT + D and then simply altering the copies as you go.
