Hi!
Recently, I’ve won the 3D Plant Modelling Competition for textures.com!
The requirements were to model a highpoly plant, which highlights the leaf detail, the subsurface characteristic of it and show it in a nice interior.
My two cents
It was quite a challenging job, because even though I’m pretty good at modeling all kinds of things, everyone can agree that the organic modeling ‘by hand’ is the most difficult one. I wasn’t so sure that just the old-fashioned 3D work, could measure up with a dedicated software to the fauna creation. But when I saw the workflow and the results of the great @iwo_pilc tutorial for Textures.com, I knew that I had to try it someday.
So, I followed Iwo’s tutorial and created the Alocasia from scratch in Blender. The whole project took me about two weeks, after hours. For the most part it follows the tutorial, but I put there some of my own ideas too, which I had to develop for this specific case, like the thickness and all surface deformations of the leaves being fully controlled by modifiers, or the stem separated from the leaf connects with the leaf by the shrinkwrap and data transfer modifier for seamlessness.
Technical stuff
The scene was rendered with 3000 samples in 4K, without the adaptive sampling, caustics enabled (the glass pot is the emitter), light paths set at 100 in total and with Indirect Light Clamping set at 80 and Direct at 0. The rest of the settings are pretty standard.
The scene, in general, is lit with three light sources: just the white world light, the sun with the wide angle and the second sun with the sharp angle. To the last sun I also parented two additional suns with slightly different directions to create small, scattered shadows from the sharp sun.
The rest of the lights are the additional lights that light the room in the back and are linked to the specific objects in the scene.
The winning image
A glimpse to my work
The scene and postprodution video breakdown here
See the project in the editorial way on my behance page:
The transplanting of Alocasia | Behance
Also come to my IG too! 
Adrian Długosz | @dlugosz.illustrating
