Last year, I had the opportunity to test the new software from E-On, Plant Factory. Meanwhile, I discovered the software from Allegorithmic, Substance Designer. Initially, I wanted to use Substance Designer to texture the trees, but Plant Factory exports “tiled” textures, which were not managed at the time by Substance Designer (but they are now). So I had the idea of ​​making bonsai trees : it allowed me to create plinths that I could texture with Substance Designer, while allowing me to create trees with more extreme forms.
So I created the plinths on 4D cinema (some shapes are taken directly from my other projects). I then imported the plinths on Plant Factory to create the bonsais directly on them. I exported the composition on Substance Designer for texturing and composed everything on Cinema 4D for the final rendering. The Photoshop part was very limited on this project : I just tweaked the colors and contrasts and added some grit to the image.
I finished this project last year. But I didn’t found a good way to expose the pictures : I wanted the trees of the same species to be side by side, but they looked too tiny on the old Behance layout. This changed with the new page layout and the “full bleed” option. So I have been able to publish this project, one year after its completion !