The Flower - Leaf

To continue with the flower, a proper one, especially a stylized one has leaves. Mine will have one oversize leaf as I have further plans with it, but I'll come to that later.

To start off again a good outline is needed. Probably everybody could think about 10 different leaf shapes immediately as we see them day by day, but I took a template just to make sure. Especially as I want to model the leaf with its veins. In my opinion, there could be two ways to model such an object. One way is to go the photo realistic way, in that case very good textures are needed, but a less complicated model. Second is a more toony appearance with more detailed model (e.g.: thickness, veins), which needs less or no textures, but a bit more work on the model. I choose the second option for this usage.


 The template curve will result a nice surface, when filled out. One could think, that this is already enough as leaves material is thin. Indeed and that might be also enough for previously mentioned option number one, but I'll need more than that. Therefore thickness has to be added. Not much though. A concave bent bottom and a flat top side should do with only a minimum of material in between. The base of the leaf will be quite similar to the stem, but less randomly curved as it is built up from the outline. The veins are then added as additional edges to the polygon object, to be able to move them separately. There may be many good solutions, I preferred to move the top veins and bottom veins equally downwards a bit to create the displacement as seen on a leaf.


Finally some bending in each direction is applied to add some"life" and gravity effect. The leaf is then attached to the stem.

The material applied will express the half-toony, half-realistic appearance, which I have intended. I use a green multicolor ramp shader with a minor transparency and a major transluency.