Continuing the theme of foliage I tackled the large palm next. I think I could have gotten away with making one hero palm for this but in case I wanted more or wanted to easily change things I again went with the more procedural route.
Using the same leaf system as the topiary, I made a base leaf for the frond and then alternated their spawn on the frond stem. The scale of each leaf was based on the shape of a ramp so I could fine-tune the shape of the frond. I also added controls for changing the direction of the leaves and added some randomness. The white lines visible are the lines each piece originated from, I use these later to control a “gravity“ bend.
The premise of the gravity bend was to have a system that would droop all of the fronds first, then each leaf independently so they have the proper orientation and effect applied. This is done useing the “bones” of each piece to define the start point and distance for the bend to apply.
The palm trunk was pretty straight forward to make, the shape was made based off of a pscale ramp and swept. The leaves were added based on a variety of height and angle controls to get the shape right. Some dead fronds were added hanging off as well to provide a bit more detail.
Once again I had some fun with the final product and brought it into Marmoset again for texturing and a quick render using raytracing.