Phyllotaxis Flower Blossom (Patreon)

I wanted to expand on the previous setup and possibly do a little series of techniques revolving around plants and getting into more advanced aspects including simulation, shading and rendering.  (The last two images are reference photography that I used to inform this technique)

This setup uses the same VEX code from last time to arrange the the flower petals.  To keep things easy to control, the petals are initially treated as curves with each petal being represented by one backbone curve.

The blooming animation is performed using KineFX to bend and grow the curves.  This is really cool to do with KineFX as it lets us generate really complex joint skeletons for the flower and animate it entirely in SOPs.  This lets us use attributes to uniquely influence the timing and shape of every curve.

The curves are then fed into a Vellum hair constraint sim, which is driven by our base animation.  This is a really great way to add some life to any procedural animation.  You get some nice springiness, collisions, and capability to add forces like wind while still remaining close to the timing and art direction of the base animation.

Lastly the curves are converted into flower petals using a sweep, extrusion and smoothed to look a little more organic.  Clean UVs were created by using a template axis aligned petal which gets it's UV coordinates copied to all the other petals.

The render is setup with Redshift, with noises being used in the shader to drive color and displacements.

Some simplified examples of the Vellum and KineFX techniques are also included in the file, I find that making little tests like that are a great way to understand and experiment with things before moving on to tackling a larger, more complicated setup :)

Let me know if you have any questions or you find there's a better way to do any of these steps!