Article about my method for making plants. Includes a fairly basic guide to making the mesh and texture (nothing that is program-specific though), and a few things about optimizing the appearance of how it looks in the game. Not for brand-new creators, basic knowledge of making a mesh and importing it into SimPE is required.

’ve seen a few people wondering about making plants, and had a few ask me how to make them more realistic, so I’m writing this. It’s not a tutorial, but more like a guide to help. I won’t give any specific instructions, seeing as programs can vary so much, but the general terms should be fairly consistent

Setting up the texture

When I make plants, I find it easiest to work backwards and start with the texture. Depending on what kind of plant your making there is a few things that you will need to have on the texture:

 Growing out of the ground
- For plants that grow out of the ground, the only thing you need for a basic plant, like a fern, is a texture for the leaf.  If you want to make something a little more complicated, like a flowering bush, then you will need a leaf texture in addition to a flower texture. If you want, you can additionally include a small green texture for the stems, but I find it easier to just a few pixels from the leaf.

 Growing out of a pot, or from a vase
- When you have a plant growing of a pot or vase, you will probably need a couple extra things on the texture: the pot (or vase), and the dirt in the pot.  If your pot/vase is glass, then depending on what you clone as a base, you will either need a slightly transparent swatch on the texture, or on a separate texture. (To avoid transparency issues, I’d recommend putting the glass in a separate subset, which may or may not use a separate texture depending on how it’s set up. Either way works) Then of course you need the texture for the leaves and the flowers, if you plan on having any.

Making the texture

By now you should know what you will need, so now it’s time to collect the parts. I usually start with the flower (or the leaf, if there is no flower) since that is the “main” part that will attract the most attention. After that, if needed, I make the texture for the pot/vase, and then lastly I squeeze in the texture for dirt. (Again, only if needed.) It doesn’t matter which order you get them, just make sure they all fit on the texture and have ample space around them so that the UV Map on the mesh won’t overlap.

In Photoshop I’ll make a new document, 512x512 pixels with a transparent background. Then on a new layer Ill paste in the picture of my flower (for the example, a daisy I got off of Google Images) and cut out the background so that I have just the flower.  (Will be further explained later when it comes time to make the mesh)

For the leaf, I searched Google again to get an idea of what a daisy plant looks like. Although varied, it looks like most of the plants have leaves that are kind of stringy, and a fairly bright green.  Another quick scan of Google didn’t turn up anything that I thought I could use, so I’m going to use one of my old scans of a marigold leaf. It’s not exactly stringy, but it has 11 smaller leaves making up the entire thing, so it looks kind of separated and fairly thin.  I don’t think that its particularly close to what I saw on Google, but it can provide the right effect at least.

After adding a pot and some dirt, my texture looks like this:

Planning the mesh

Next, think about what kind of plant your making. Does it need visible stems, or can you get away with the flowers being “attached” to the leaves? Are the leaves individual, or are they more of a branch? Then, if it’s more branched, can the flowers be put on the texture for the branch?

In the example to the right, the leaves are based on branches and the flowers don’t need specific stems as visible support, they can just attach to the branches and look fine.

Now in this example, the flowers are not attached to the branches, because there are no branches. This plant is based on leaves; therefore you need to have stems supporting the flowers.

Building the Mesh

When I start making the mesh, I create the individual parts one at a time, all separate. For the flower I will create a square plane, with two horizontal and vertical divisions, then for the leaf I will make another plane with two horizontal divisions and 4 vertical divisions.  For the pot I’m going to make a cylinder with 12 axis divisions and 1 vertical division. From left to right: Flower, Leaf, Pot.

To make the pot more pot-like, select the top row of vertices and scale them out, so the top of the pot is bigger than the bottom. After a few extrusions and some more scaling, I’ve indented the top of the pot. (Select the top faces and extrude them once, but do not move them, just scale them in a little. Then select the inner ring of faces you just scaled and extrude them again, but moving them down a little this time.) For the stems, I will make a cylinder with 3 axis divisions and 4 or 5 vertical divisions so that’s it’s actually a triangle prism. (It gives the look of a round stem, but cuts way down on the polygon count) To get the stem green,  give it any kind of UV Map and scale it down ridiculously small so that it will fit on the leaf.

All my parts so far:

Assembling the Mesh

To start, I’m going to duplicate the stem (to keep the original incase its needed later) and bend it into a more round, curved shape. After that, reposition it so that it looks like it’s coming out of the dirt and rotate it to a more natural angle. Select the flower and duplicate it, then rotate and move it so that it’s at the top of the stem.

Now for the leaves, you can do it many ways. You can put a big cluster of leaves in the middle of the pot and stick the flowers out, or you can just put a few leaves around the bottom of the stem for each flower, you can put them all up and down the stem, etc.  Before you start placing the leaves, move the vertices vertically so that the leaf mesh is in an arch shape:

I’ve placed leaves around the bottom, as well as a few on the stem itself. I have three in the dirt around the stem and two on the stem itself.

Now I’m going to group all the leaves, the stem, and the flower together. (So that I can select it and duplicate it easily. Unless your program has a feature for automatic separation again, I recommend selecting all the separate groups and duplicating them that way instead) With the new group selected, I’m going to duplicate it 5 or 6 times and rotate them around so they all stick out from around the middle of the pot.

Once again I am going to select all the flowers, stems, and leaves, and group them together into one major group, and duplicate it to make the plant “thicker”. After duplicating, I scaled it down and rotated it a little. Now if you look closely at it, you’ll notice that some parts of the leaves and stems cut through other parts of the flowers and leaves that they shouldn’t. So to fix that you can ungroup your mesh (hence why I said that I don’t recommend grouping it in the first place unless you can ungroup it later) and then adjust each leaf/flower as needed. If you have everything grouped and can’t ungroup it, you can still try to move the vertices but it most likely be considerable harder.

Notes on Getting it into the Game

Depending on how you want to do the final mesh, in either one or two subsets, there are a couple of other things in the package file that you might want to adjust accordingly.

If you have a glass vase/pot, you should put it into a separate subset than the foliage with the material definition line “stdMatAlphaBlendMode” set to “blend”. The way the game renders things, it tries to move anything that is transparent to the top, so that sometimes will result in very odd appearances if the foliage and glass are in the same subset.

If you have a solid pot, as I do in this example, you can put them both into the same subset. However when you have opaque and transparent things in the same subset, you have to set the material definition line “stdMatAlphaTestEnabled” from “0” to “1”. If this is activated, the game will cut off any pixels in the texture that have transparency so that they are completely invisible, leaving only the 100% solid pixels. Because this won’t render translucent pixels, you can’t use it for the situation above with a glass vase. If you try to use stdAlphaBlendMode when you don’t have any translucent pixels, the game will take the part of the mesh that is completely solid (texture covering the entire mesh 100% without any alphas, not solid parts of the texture) and stick it on top.

These aren’t really rules or anything, just what I’ve noticed when I make plants. J The settings can be quite finicky, try different ways until you find the one that looks the best.

One last note about the game: the anti-aliasing engine does NOT support edges that are made by an alpha channel. No matter how smooth your texture is, the edges will almost always look jagged in game. (Although some graphic cards have options to turn it on, it can’t be done by the game alone.)