Building Lesson 008: Advanced Unions (Plants)

Hello Builders! Last lesson we discussed how to make a tree. It was fun and simple but made quite a good looking tree. Since you are Dev Trainees now you will learn more difficult material. I do not expect you to immedietaly get this lesson, but this is a more difficult one and will join together with our advanced unioning lessons in a 2 in 1 building lesson.

Now some tasks in advanced building are to be done with plugins. If you do not know how to install a plugin onto your roblox studio, it is quite simple. Watch this video or another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4O4oRQDidg

Now this lesson we will be using the plugin I use the most. Model Resize by DaMrNelson. In my opinion, this is the best plugin for resizing models because it can resize to any percentage using a built-in Gui. This is extremely helpful for getting just the right size with small calculations.

First we will talk about grass. This morning I took a visit to Overgrown Hideout by AgentTech.

As you can see, many of these plants are meshes. As discussed previously, meshes are good for things hard to recreate with bricks, but now that unions are here, we can make our own grass. I do not believe many builders do this but this is something that I frequently use. I use unions to make unreal and natural shapes to replace meshes. In lesson 2, I showed you a rock I made using over 30 negative parts. I have created many more things using way over thirty, even sometimes hundreds of negative parts. Don’t be bummed if you can’t make things like this right away. First of all, the statue has taken me over 4 hours so far and still is not complete, and unions came out the week I began building so I was born right into its use.

So let’s begin with a giant long brick. What we are going to do is make a simple plant that can replace the mesh seen here in Home Sweet Home.

I want a curve to this piece of grass, so let’s make a cylinder part that overlays the part I want to cut out like so.

I want to do the same to the other side. Like mentioned in lesson 2, unions can be used as negative parts as well. Duplicate the union and separate it. Then follow the implied instructions in these pictures. Notice that because we want the strand of grass to get smaller as it goes up, you should tilt the negate very slightly.

Now you have a strand of grass! But if you want, make it more curvy edges by taking smaller bricks and using a variety of rotations like so.

If you want to make a multiple-strand plant, then duplicate with a variety of positions, rotation and scale. Then take your finished product and resize it to a smaller size like this.

So that’s an example on how to make a simple grass bunch. These are just some of the examples on how to make advanced union structure and nice random curves. I use this very often and you can now do it as well. If you want other examples on plants like this, stay tuned for our new video lessons to see me make several more. Join us next time when we learn how to make pine and palm trees.

-Domswolf