Stephanotis Floribunda

Had a random inspiration to create a high quality model of a house plant which we had. The species is Stephanotis Floribunda. It is usually arranged into a arc shape over the pot. It was a fun object to recreate because I had not modelled any plant in a while.

The 3D asset is available for purchase on: Fab and CGTrader

Plant Geometry & Textures

I started out creating a procedural leaf and blossom scattering system with Blender Geometry Nodes but later went with manual approach because it was more efficient. Designing a procedural system can often get too time consuming versus just modeling a thing manually.

I only created a texture for the leaf. The other parts of the plant are so thin that the texture does not matter too much. I had access to the actual plant so I just took a picture of the leaf and touched the texture up a bit.

Mulch Geometry & Textures

The mulch pieces at the bottom i created by sculpting a volume into the correct shape which i then converted to a mesh.

I used a complex shader network to get the right look on the high poly meshes that would resemble a mulch piece texture.

Then in the end i just created a lower res mesh and baked the high res mesh and material into textures.

Mulch Instances

It was quite tedious to place the pieces(148) by hand but I knew that it could not be done procedurally in a way that it would look natural in the end. So it was more practical to spend an hour placing them instead of multiple hours fiddling with procedural ways and mabye not getting a good result in the end.