GROW PROCEDURAL PLANTS TO SPRUCE UP ARCHVIZ SCENES

Rob Redman's Cinema 4D renders bloom as he explains his workflow for creating easy greenery with the Taiao plugin

- Rob Redman's

Creating organic shapes, especially plant life, used to be a time-consuming task, needing lots of reference material, texture painting and more. And then there's the modelling part! Luckily, Cinema 4D users have been treated well by third-party developers and Insydium have created Taiao, part of their Fused set of tools, which makes this a breeze. The biggest benefit of Taiao is twofold. Firstly it generates an infinite variety of realistic plants, from the smallest of flowers to the mightiest of trees, while remaining procedural. This means you can go back, literally to the root and branch level, and make any edits you need.

Secondly, the workflow is highly intuitive, so the learning curve is as shallow as possible. It's based on a layering system, where different levels of trunk, branches, leaves and so on can be added and manipulated separately. It's a fantastic system, and one that can benefit all types of 3D artist.

Over the next few pages, I'll give you a bit of a boot camp so you can get up to speed and learn how to make your own greenery. That said, don't feel like Taiao is limited to archviz renders. It's an animatable system, so you can use it for all manner of motion graphic projects too, and you can easily adapt to non-plant objects by switching materials. You can even grow plants into object volumes for some easy topiary.

01 GROWTH POINT OR TRUNK? 

Although you can start a plant at any layer, once you go to the Insydium menu and choose a to Plant object, the obvious choice is to start with a trunk. However, you can work with multiple objects by choosing Growth Point in the Attributes Manager. For our example, we'll use Growth Points set to 5 and with a Radius of 20cm. A Cone Angle of 30 is fine for now. We can edit later if needed.

02 ADD A TRUNK