Next piece of foliage I decided to tackle was the Banana leaf plant. My goals were to adapt the palm’s setup to fit my needs and it need to have the tearing that occurs on the leaves when they are first unfurling.
From the palm I was able to keep the trunk and frond setup almost exactly how it is, the majority of the changes were to the leaf system.
Because I wanted to add randomness to the leaves they needed to be added one by one to the fronds so I could introduce the variations based on the frond. The leaves were initially created using the same system as previous the addition of a remesh, for extra detail, and not merging the center points of the mirror.
The reason for not merging was so I could at the leaf splits randomly on either side to break up the shapes even more. The breakup was done using the RBD fracture node with points supplied by a scatter node on the “bone“. After that I measured a bounding box for each part and applied all necessary info to a bend node that would bend each section with a bit of variance.
To get the leaf onto the fronds, I used the “frond bone” (a line) with a randomized carve and the path deform node with a randomized scale. This provided a lot of variation in shapes for the leaves where no leaf could be repeated. The frond and leaf now combined were bent once more using the previous system to simulate gravity, I also included a bit of randomized twist this time.
At this point, I had done some test renders in the scene and found it a bit lacking in depth, I decided to go back to the leaf and add some extra noise to breakup the leaf shape a bit more.
As a final sanity check, I once again brought the model into Marmoset for a quick texture and render to verify the UVs and breakouts were working as I intended.
