creating modular organic shapes - flower

Frangipani

This week, I have been given the task to create some vegetation for one of the levels in the game. Again, for final product quality reasons, I had to find a flower that would be formed as repeated modular items, meaning that if one petal is created and copied and rotated, it will give the final product. And by doing this, the whole model will actually consist of one small piece of geometry, repeated and overlapped onto the UVW map and texture map. So the texture will have higher resolution this way.

After doing some research into this, I have decided to model a Frangipani.
These were my reference images. (Fig 1 an Fig 2)

Fig 1

Fig 2

So following these images,  the first iteration of my model came out as shown in Fig 3 :

Fig 3

However, looking at it, I have realised that the folding edges of the petals didn't have enough thickness as in the reference images, so I have carried on working on them. I have shaped it better, so that when texturedm it will give the sensation of thickness. When finished and textured, the back of my model looked as in Fig 4, while the front looked like Fig 5.

Fig 4

Fig 5

In order to create variety, I have taken the individual petals and rotated them, in order to create a flower in bud  and a slightly opened one (Fig 6).

Fig 6

I have learned a lot from this mini project, and the main aspect that I am taking out of it, is how to work efficient for a certain platform, IPhones in this case. Because the memory required to run the application is limited, we had to create such models that will not require a lot of memory space. Again, in order to increase the texture resolution, the quality of the visual aspect, I have learned to create modular products (create a petal and repeat) and overlap in the unwrapping and texturing phases of the process.
I feel that my skills have improved again, through repeating the modelling process.