Advanced Unions 002- Plant Leaves

Hello everyone! Welcome back to Advanced Unions. As I promised, this lesson we will be making a unioned plant with leaves

As I showed you all in the review lesson, cylinder unions are quite common in building. We will be using one for the stem of our plant today. Take a cylinder mesh and lay it on its side. Then duplicate it, negate it, and cut the piece like so. (If you have trouble finding right spot, I moved negative part 1.6 studs to the left and 2 studs higher with a cylinder 74 by 74 studs)

Now because we want the plant to start on the ground. Take another negative part and cut out everything below the baseplate.

If you want to make the stem more round, do what I did in the beginner class' Building Lesson 8. I took bricks and used different rotations and shaved the union to make it more round like a mesh. This technique will eventually be a lesson of its own if you are having trouble doing it.

Now our stem is done. This plant is looking to be easier than it is. Now we need to add the leaves onto the sides of the stem. We are actually going to use a sphere mesh for this one. Take a brick and put a special mesh into it, then go to your properties and change the mesh type to sphere. Like the cylinder, the sphere is better used in a mesh since all the sides have to be symmetrical. With a mesh we can really stretch the shape out, which is what we will want to do.

Take a sphere and stretch it out like so. Dimensions are 5.8, 4.4, 9.0 (choose your own, this is just for if you have trouble with negative part placement)

Then duplicate it and make a negative part out of it. Bring it higher by 0.2 studs only. Then you should get a shape like this.

To make it flatter, shave off the top 2/3 of the union. Then you should get a nice beautiful leaf. Put it on the sides of your plant and it makes a nice build

Of course, this Honor's Class is all about you finding your inner developer. Some of you may think the leaf is a little flat and fake looking. There is another way to make it. First, make the sphere shape again. Then take another sphere and really stretch is out like so: (Mine may be a bit exaggerated. Do yours a bit less and make the negative part 0.4-0.6 studs higher. Make it a tad bit taller too.)

This way, the edges of your leaf are more smooth (by smooth I mean natural and realistic. It should look quite pointy). The way I showed you before is not the way I like to do it, but it is the easiest. If you prefer a challenge, keep practicing with this smoother way.

Oh and I almost forgot, make sure CanCollide is false on this plant since people will be walking through fields of it.

I have taught the building many different trees and plants but there is still so much more to come. Next time I will do a whole lesson about making unioned rocks that will show you how to master the round union technique. See you then!

-Domswolf

Exercises

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Make a small field of unioned plants