Making of Raindrops by Paco Morales, Mexico




Hello everyone, in this tutorial I will explain how I created this image for the CGArena Autumn challenge and won a first prize. First, we have to model the branch and it’s a good idea to search some references on the internet and studying them before start anything.

Concept Sketch









I used 2 photos to create the branch and set as backgrounds in the viewport (for creating background in the viewport create two planes one for the front and other for the top view and apply a references photos as material). My intention was not producing a perfect match, just a lifelike branch.



Modeling the Branch

We start with a 16 sided cylinder with 1 cap segment. And convert it to an editable mesh. With this, we will start from the thickest to the thinnest sides, just as branches grow in nature.


In the above images you can see that some extrusions are added in the cylinder, in order to start generating the body of the branch, and so on.