Elephants Earring [WEEK 10]

 Here i have included a video showcasing my models so far, I'm not able to create a turntable so i created a video instead to capture all angles of my models. The plant i have made below is one i have called the Elephants Earring, it is a single plant with two trunks that intertwine to make a sort of infinity symbol shape. I had a little trouble with this plant and trying to get the curved trunks to look alright but I'm quite pleased with the end result.

Final model

Base Model

UV

Modelling Process -

Firstly, I extruded a cylinder to the shape of the trunk in the front viewport, once i was happy with this i switched to the side viewport and selected the faces, going up the trunk and pushing or pulling them to get that swooping S shape, this took some tweaking as to not make the trunk look lumpy or too straight in areas, once i was happy with this i UV mapped it and copied the model, rotating it 180 degrees so that it would spiral correctly. I UV as i go so that 1- i dont have so much to do at the end, and 2- when i duplicate the model it duplicated the UV so they stay symmetrical.

Next, I moved onto the petals at the bottom of the plant, i used the same technique as i did on the scorpion tree to get a spike like shape, i did this by making a more conical shape with the cylinder polygon. Similar to the trunk of the plant, i UV mapped this then duplicated and rotated it to the correct position. 

The upper petals follow much of the same process, just at a slightly different angle.

The smaller stalks i repeated the process for the trunks to make them slightly curved inwards, when rotated they bend towards one another, following that figure of 8 shape.

Finally i created the leaves with cubes that i squashed down and extruded into shape, bevelling the edges to give them more of a rounded shape, i could have done this with the cylinder polygon but i preferred the more flat and thinner shape of the cube.

The final step after UV mapping everything that i might have missed is saving the UVs, bringing them into my drawing software and making the textures. To place the textures onto my model i assign the surface shader material, and in the attributes folder change the out colour of the surface shader to my custom texture, then toggle on the textures in the bar at the top and you should be able to see them.

My next steps are to just carry on making as many models as i can, i have made 6/15 now and i feel fairly confident that i will be able to make all 15 by the time of submission.