Flower Generation
This was a 2 week sprint for a school project. Our team had the idea for a tile capturing game like splatoon, but visualizing the captured area using Flowers and nature. I decided to look at generating flowers to be able to make the capturing more visually interesting. I've tried 2 different methods of exporting to unreal. Alembics allow for the visualization to be as intended fully textured and animated, the drawback is performance when there's a lot of flower spawn. VAT's optimize performance a lot but with the current setup you cant export Uv's with the model.
As a starter I've used a petal from a flower to create a mesh that fits the texture. and made sure topology allowed for proper bending
I set 3 petals with different bend amounts which are bound to $F to create a effect that looks like opening up
I've created Phyllotaxis , (flower seeding patterns) and used that for the petal placement/orientation.
Using a for each & time offsets to create a sprouting flower petal.
Merging everything together with an L-system, I've used the same methods for bending and animating the leaves on the stems
In the end the flowers were exported and animated using Vertex Animation Textures