Making of Grapes by Raul Fabian, Romania



Concept

This Grapes image was made for Autumn 3D challenge on CGArena and won third prize. The most important inspiration was the post with the autumn colors palette by CGArena admin Ashish Rastogi (ashras99). So I have decided to make a close up of a big, juicy grape, an image with most of the colors from that palette. First I made a sketch of the image to see the approximate camera angle, and other things like leaves positions, quantity of leaves etc. I also searched the internet for a good background image.



Not very accurate sketch, but I think enough for a first impression. The final image has also some minor modifications.


Modeling

I started the modeling process with the leaves.  The modeling of the leaves was not very hard. I just created a primitive plane and converted it to editable poly. First I started to cut the faces of the plane to achieve approx shape of a grape leaf. After that I simply deleted the polygons that I don’t need. To obtain a more realistic look of the leaves I have used Noise and FFD modifiers and just played around with their values. To obtain three different leaves I just moved some vertexes and deleted some more polygons, and voila now I have three different leaves.



Above you can see the leaf obtained from the initial plane.




Above you can see the 3 different leaves. The only thing remaining for the leaves now is their stem. The stem is a simple cylinder converted to editable poly. I have moved some vertices and after that I have applied Meshsmooth modifier. Again moving some more vertices will give you three different stem shapes like in the above picture. A complete leaf model is shown in the following image: