Home is where the coconut grows.
As a native of Chicago, I never imagined that my sense of belonging would lead me to a place over one thousand miles away. After all, people drop their lives on a dime to move to a city like the one that birthed me… but the universe has a way of communicating with us, often in subtle and unexpected ways.
I vividly remember the first time I felt Florida becoming my home. I was staying at my aunt’s house during a short vacation and happened to be taking a shower when I noticed a coconut palm swaying gently just outside the window. The sun was glistening on the torn and weathered fronds – a reminder that Mother Nature keeps her balance sheets tidy and rewards stoutness bountifully. I was overcome in that instant with emotion and knew that I had to be stout for myself. And so, the warm climate, vibrant colors, and lush landscape of Florida captivated me and pulled me towards them.
I set roots in Florida rather quickly and my goals started falling into place. I went back to school for a biology degree, found a loving partner, and earned a fulfilling job as a professional landscape designer. The beauty of Florida's native greenspaces inspired me, and I poured my heart into creating breathtaking landscape designs for clients on both coasts.
One day I learned that my fiancé's parents purchased a new house across the street from us. They too felt the flora of Florida tugging at them and their desires to be closer to family closed the agreement. Florida was becoming their new home too. That's when the idea struck me - I would create a 3D rendering of their new residence complete with stunning Florida landscaping as a heartfelt gift, both to them and to the ecosystem that first nudged me to jump from feeling trapped to tropical.
My expertise in landscape design and my passion for 3D rendering must now combine to transform a decorticated house into a decorated home. My goal is to carefully and thoughtfully create a rendered scene that captures the essence of their new home and the beauty of Florida's landscape in one. Since there is not an abundance of Florida native plant models, I must create some of these myself, often using scans of real leaves and modeling in situ trees in figura.
Coincidentally, there happens to be a coconut palm just outside their front door. Isn’t that something.
Software and equipment used
Moasure One, AutoCAD, Sketchup, Blender, Lumion, SpeedTree, TreeIt
30 April 2023
I'm working on the oak tree model for the one already existing on the left side of the house. I took several photos of the tree and tried tonight to recreate the branching pattern of the main trunk, as well as add the character secondary, tertiary, and quaternary branches/twigs. I'm really happy with the branch design at this point and hope the leaves will end up looking realistic once added.
You can see in the image with the leaves that I've already scanned in several oak leaves, both front and back, to make the model as realistic as possible.
22 April 2023
Today I worked on my first Florida Native plant model. I used real scans of cocoplum leaves and created a small hedge type model with three color motifs. When cocoplum grows, it usually sends out leaves with super red tips, and as the leaves mature, the red color fades. I used the placement of the leaves along with my scans to try and emulate the color pattern of a growing specimen. I then removed the very red tips for an intermediate color, and finally I removed all red leaves for an "older" specimen that isn't actively growing.
All this was accomplished using Photoshop, GIMP, and TreeIt, of which the latter is a free program for plant modeling. Figuring out all the options when it comes to modeling has been very difficult for me. I think I understand what a texture and mesh are, but there are no TreeIt tutorials or help guides that I could find and learn from. In any case, I'm going to keep trying to model stuff until it looks right. I think I did a pretty good job on these hedge types for being a self-taught modeler!
20 April 2023
I've got a pretty good start on this project already, but I know I have a long way to go. Originally, I intended on creating a simple landscaping plan for John's parents in AutoCAD and leaving it at that, but later I toyed with the idea of rendering their landscape after seeing a really nice render at my work, and this competition was the spark I needed to push myself to do it.
I was able to take my moasure one measurements and translate them into a sketchup model of their house after about two weeks of trial and error. This house is my first sketchup model from scratch, although I did use a few components from sketchup's library, like the windows and garage door. I was then able to bring the model into lumion rather quickly and started assigning materials and settings. Of course, the first plant I had to get right was the iconic coconut palm, and in the image titled "POMONA ROUGH HQ" you can see my first rendering of their new house, palm included. I have not even begun to fine tune the 3D models of the other plants around the house that already exist, and that is my next step. I think the first one will be the oak to the left of their house, which you can see hovering over the open garage in my second photo.
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