Hey all!
While I normally record my entire progress and like to share it with whoever is interested, this project is a bit more personal. I just wanted to go all out for once, not caring that much about performance or proper practices and just focus on the end result.
For quite some time now I felt the need to just make something for fun but never could come up with something concrete until I saw a food documentary about the versatility of the lotus plant.
As a teen I really loved learning about ancient cultures and how religion shaped those cultures and when I recently started reading more about Hindu culture, Lore, symbolic meaning some things started to click.
subconsciously I might also have been influenced a tad by Uncharted 4 its DLC “The Lost Legacy” now that I think about it.
So I started gathering a moodboard of some sort around the beautiful Lotus, Mandala’s, and reading upon quite some symbolism in the Hindu religion.
Some images for the mood:
So by now I knew I wanted to make an animated lotus which from the top would look like a mandala.
So besides a few scribbles and thoughts I started out modeling the Lotus plant.
I figured I’d start with the stamen first, as a lot that I would do with this might be reusable knowledge for the petals and such.
I showed this to my buddy @Kashaar who said “interesting! But looks a bit too regular I think”
and since I have a moodboard open filled with mandala’s the critique was at the right time.
So I gave it another shot:
which is much more to my liking.
Keep in mind that the timing is all but final at this point, and will be iterated upon once I get everything inside UE4.
From there on --while still writing down ideas, scratching out others-- I decided to animate a petal.
I tweaked it a bit since, but the overal shape and movement is the same, but it doesnt shrink at those last few frames anymore.
Now, since I knew that I needed layers upon layers of petals I wanted to be sure that there is no overlapping of meshes besides where someone viewing it would never notice.
So after some attempts:
Each layer is animated differently, reusing what I learned making the previous layers of petals.
Lets go over each in the next post. (as I seem to have hit a limit of images/gifs?)