Please recommend 3D software for doing leaves

July 8, 2009 5:48 AM

Digital graphics artists, hi! I have a painting in mind--a foliate head (aka 'green man') or rather several of them, embedded in foliage. I expect the final form will be in acrylic on masonite because I want it to be bigger than any monitor or color printer I'm ever likely to have. But I want to do most of the detail prep digitally, and it will involve 3D work because I plan to stare at and think about every single one of X hundreds of leaves, sized and rotated to fit in with its neighbors. So I'm fishing for recommendations about which of the free 3D packages I should plan on using. I know the learning curve will be pretty steep and I want to pick one program and stick to it. Free candidates I know of are SketchUp, Blender, and Bryce 5, but I'll consider anything. Does any one of these, or any other one you've used, stand out from the rest for doing complex-mesh organic forms like, um, leaves? If any of them make it easy (or anyway less hard) to texture flat(ish) objects on both surfaces, that's a big plus. Thanks very much! Oh, Windows or Linux. Got no Mac.
posted by jfuller to media & arts (10 comments total)

The only program from your list that I'm familiar with is SketchUp, and while it is really easy to learn and completely awesome for producing quick 3D sketches, I would never use it for a project like you described. SketchUp (like most 3D programs) is great with geometric shapes, but freeform or textured objects are not only much more difficult to model well, but the increased complexity of the vector mesh means that you'd need a top of the line computer system to work with a model that contains hundreds of them.

That said, if nobody here has a better option, this CAN be done in SketchUp. It a simple program and a few hours playing around with their tutorials will give you all you need to learn. Your best bet would be to make small sections of the piece at a time digitally, get those right, and then composite everything in the final painting.

(Of all the modeling programs I have used, I think Rhino would be a good candidate, but it is definitely not free. An industrial designer may know of a better option, though.)
posted by Fifi Firefox at 10:11 AM on July 8

On second thought, wouldn't this be pretty easy to model in real life? Get some styrofoam mannequin heads, attach real leaves, then take photos to test angles and do light studies? Just a thought.
posted by Fifi Firefox at 10:19 AM on July 8

Phew, thats a tall order.

Blender allows you to work in curves/subdiv mesh. Sketch-up, I believe is poly-only. Bryce has a low-learning barrier, so you can start working with it quickly, but it doesn't have much precision. As I recall, to get anything organic looking you'll have to stick a bunch of "meta-balls" together.

Also, I'm probably a snob, having worked with Maya for a few years now, but I really don't think any of those programs are going to give you what you're looking for. If you're just going to be using 3D for planing, why not go for Maya 8.5 Personal Learning Edition? Full functionality, of a few versions back, but with watermarked images.
posted by fontophilic at 10:31 AM on July 8 [1 favorite]

Forget the free programs. The industrial-strength stuff like Maya is offered free under a personal-use license, and the restrictions of that license are unlikely to be even remotely restrictive of your intended uses.

You mention that the learning curve will be long. This is true, and it is why you should avoid the free programs - if you are going to invest the kind of time and effort necessary, that is something of immense value and you should invest it in learning real tools that will do what you need, are industry standard, are supported everywhere, lend real-world professional value to your experience, and will grow with your abilities instead of eventually starting to constrict you.

(The last person who ignored this advice came back several years later, having invested a huge chunk of his life into mastering a dead-end, and lamented that he wished he had listened to me.)

That said, if you don't anticipate much other use for 3d (software) skills, Fifi Firefox's maquette idea sounds like a better way. (But 3d software skills are very versatile, and can come in handy for all sorts of things.)
posted by -harlequin- at 10:46 AM on July 8

I've used the occasional 3D program and never found one that I liked. They've always felt more like engineering rather than art. Not that the one can't be the other, but none of the current crop of 3D programs really clicked for me.

I recently had a chance to fiddle with the Z Brush program, however, and found it much more intriguing. In fact, if I ever have the need to do something similar to what you're contemplating, that's probably what I'll end up getting. Assuming I can afford it.
posted by zueod at 12:19 PM on July 8

I've been trying Blender, and the learning curve isn't bad at all. Once you get over that it's not like Illustrator or Photoshop and relies heavily on certain key commands, it's not all that unintuitive. This tutorial is a decent way to start, and there's a few books out on it, too.
posted by ignignokt at 1:51 PM on July 8

I have to disagree with Fi Fi Firefox on the first point: don't discount sketchup. like any decent 3-D program, sketchup will degrade its real-time rendering gracefully if it hits resource limits; it can definitely handle hundreds of moderately-detailed leaf components in a model, and if you're trying to pan or rotate too quickly for it to redraw, it'll switch to bounding boxes so you can change your view smoothly (then it switches back to rendering the full detail).

I'll fully agree with his/her second point, though; this is something you will accomplish much more quickly with a physical model and photographs. It's partly the learning curve, partly the difficulty of working with organic 3-D shapes on a 2-D screen, and partly just my experience talking. It doesn't sound like the computer will give you anything you can't accomplish faster with a physical maquette.
posted by Chris4d at 5:59 PM on July 8

Wow, I looked at this several times after posting it this morning, saw no answers, and thought "Oh well..." Thanks very much, everybody!

I think I didn't make it clear enough up top that I plan to do the 3D work one leaf at a time rather than trying to model the whole thing. If that sounds insanely fanatical to you I can't deny it; but I did spend a number of years as a member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, doing biggish stippled illos one dot of the technical pen at a time.

The point about using physical models instead of digital ones is well taken--actually that's the way I started the project. I got one of those little vises that dry-fly makers use to tie trout flies, and several bunches of fake leaves. I snipped these off the bunch one at a time, clamped each in the fly vise, and rotated it for the sketch pad and camera that way. That works fine, just as Fifi Firefox said it would, but I think I could go faster doing it with a mesh-and-render package (after the slog up the learning curve, of course) and also pick up an interesting new (to me) computer skill at the same time.

I should maybe mention that though my dad was an architect and my mom was a commercial illustrator, and as I implied earlier I sort of know which end of the Rapidograph the ink comes out of, I have actually lived most of my life off computer geek skillz, and have drawn and painted only in traditional media. Somehow I never put the two realms together until recently. But my family gave me Photoshop for Christmas and then I went and bought Corel Painter, and working with these has called out a level of oh-my-GHOD-this-is-fun mania that's extreme even for me. I don't remember looking up from a concentration trance and realizing that it's morning already since the night I installed my first Linux distro (Slackware kernel version 1.0.13) on a 486.

I'll check back in tomorrow morning and see if anyone else has kicked in an opinion.; in the meantime thanks again to everybody who already responded. Oh, and I'll absolutely look into what the commercial 3D outfits offer in the way of personal-use licenses. I had no idea such things existed. That was worth posting the question right there.
posted by jfuller at 9:26 PM on July 8

From playing around with it a while back, I think pov-ray might be interesting for you to look at; it's a raytracer with a scripting interface, and is very good at automating the rendering of large numbers of things. So you might be able to design your single leaf in a 3d modelling program, then use pov-ray to write a function which bundles leaves together (with some degree of randomness) to form branches, then write a function which bundles those branches together etc. etc.
posted by primer_dimer at 4:29 AM on July 9

ah, so if it's pure geekery you're interested in, you can't really beat pov-ray! It's free and there's a pretty good community presence to help you learn. I taught myself how to render basic scenes on it back in middle school; if you really want to, you can code everything by hand, but there are also modeling packages like moray that give you a GUI front-end to pov-ray. If you want scripted organic goodness, you might look into L-systems; I bet there is a plugin that will do L-systems for pov-ray.
posted by Chris4d at 11:30 PM on July 14