Week 5 and Week 6(a): Virtual Plant 3D Creation
Initial Modeling Concepts
I started with the recognisable form of the evening primrose, including its central stem, flowers, and the slender pedicels that connect each bloom. From there, I imagined gentle visual animations and textures that might suggest the activity within the plant, such as pulses of light or slow internal flows. My goal was not scientific accuracy but an interpretive approach. I wanted the plant to feel alive, as if it was quietly reacting to its environment in virtual space.
The intention was not simply to model a plant, but to convey the sense that something more is happening beneath the surface. I wanted the viewer to feel that this is a responsive, living system with its own patterns and presence. As seen in many of the artworks on my mood board, I hope this piece encourages people to reflect on the agency of non-human life through form, movement, and atmosphere.
In this project, I chose the evening primrose (Oenothera) as the subject for virtual plant modelling. This decision was based on earlier research into its behavioural characteristics. Studies show that the evening primrose can respond to the vibrations of insect wings. When it detects the presence of pollinating insects such as moths, it produces more nectar to increase the chances of pollination. This behaviour reflects the plant’s ability to perceive external stimuli, suggesting that its internal processes may be regulated by a complex bioelectrical signalling system.
The evening primrose is also highly responsive to environmental changes. Its blooming schedule, nectar production, and the opening and closing of petals are affected by factors such as light, temperature, and vibration (Veits et al., 2019). These responses highlight a kind of agency that operates without language, which closely relates to this project’s focus on how internal plant signals shape outward expression.
During the modelling process, I referred to visual references of the evening primroses and previous sketches and created a simplified version of its structure( Fig 1-10). Each flower is made up of several petals with a central reproductive area, and is connected to the main stem by a slender pedicel. The pedicle emerges from a node on the stem and serves as the structural link between the flower and the rest of the plant.
Artistic Artwork Mood board:
From the mood board, I developed early ideas for how my virtual plant model might embody the invisible inner life of the evening primrose. I was particularly drawn to how certain artists visualised internal signals, such as pulses, data flows, or cellular patterns, as part of a plant’s surface. This led me to think about how I could bring those unseen dynamics into the outer layer of the model and make them visible.
Artists such as Yu Qiu, Thijs Biersteker, Thiago Mazza, Refik Anadol, Joya Berrow, Love Hultén, and Yufan Xie have all explored the idea that plants are not passive background lifeforms but active participants in ecological systems, each with rhythms, responses, and signals of their own.
Yu Qiu’s Micro-life raises awareness of the need to move beyond human-centered thinking. It reveals the interconnected vitality and intelligence of nature that often goes unnoticed. Thijs Biersteker’s Voice of Nature transforms real-time environmental data from a living tree into visual forms, allowing viewers to see how the tree responds to its surroundings. Thiago Mazza’s inflatable Caladium installation draws on scientific research that suggests plants, although they lack muscles, can still pulse in response to light and vibration, hinting at a dynamic inner life.
Refik Anadol’s Large Nature Model: Coral uses machine learning and large biodiversity datasets to create immersive environments that reimagine natural systems as abstract digital landscapes. Joya Berrow’s Where Two Kingdoms Meet focuses on fungi and roots, bringing out their hidden sounds and revealing an underground world full of texture and rhythm. Love Hultén’s A Desert Songs reads electrical signals from cacti and translates them into MIDI data and visuals inspired by microscopic plant structures. Yufan Xie’s Acoustic Garden, presented at SIGGRAPH 2024, converts plant-generated signals into an immersive sensory experience through sound and design.
These works helped shape the direction of my own modeling process. In modeling the evening primrose, I was not only interested in recreating its physical form but also in expressing its inner activity. I incorporated representations of bioelectrical signals, cellular movements, and subtle rhythms into the model’s surface. My aim was to make the plant’s internal processes more tangible and allow them to shape its digital presence.
This inflatable installation, created by Minas Gerais-based painter and muralist Thiago Mazza, is inspired by recent scientific discoveries that plants, even without muscles, pulse (“The Revolutionary Genius of Plants,” Stefano Mancuso). Plant movements occur when they receive stimuli such as light, water, gravity, etc. Plants respond through movement to external stimuli. It is also known that plants emit electrical signals to respond to their environment and to communicate with certain animals, like bees collecting pollen.
For the design of the inflatable, Mazza painted the Caladium, a plant native to the forests of South and Central America, also known as tajá or heart of Jesus. It gets its name from its heart shape and its varied foliage colors, such as green, purple, pink, white, and red. The texture of its leaves and veins resemble those of a heart, reminding one of blood vessels and tissues. The heart of Jesus plant is also tied to indigenous superstitions, believed to ward off evil.
Thijs Biersteker art installation Voice of Nature sits on the intersection of environmental awareness art and bio art. Collaborating with scientists from Delft Technical University we used real-time data coming from a living tree to highlight the urgency of climate change.
Using environmental sensors we generated 1,600 data points to create a data visualisation that showed how the tree was feeling in real time about the environmental changes happening around it.
Refik Anadol Art installation ‘Large Nature Model’: Coral is an exploration of how technology and nature can intersect to inspire a new form of digital engagement with our natural world. This artwork draws attention to the urgency of climate change and the fragility of our ecosystems, with a specific focus on coral reefs. Using a dataset of approximately 100 million images, the piece immerses viewers in an artificial and abstract environment, representing the existing beauty of global biodiversity.
The piece invites viewers to engage with the balance between human innovation and nature’s vulnerability, with a vision for the future where AI and digital technologies are used to enhance our understanding of the natural world, helping us connect more deeply with it.
The artwork exemplifies the integration of AI into the realm of environmental art, offering a powerful message: through technology, we have the tools to imagine a future where human creativity and AI coexist in harmony with the environment. Refik Anadol’s mission in creating this piece is to bridge the digital and physical worlds, using AI to inspire deeper reflection and responsibility toward nature. This immersive, data-driven narrative serves as a call to action for both preservation and innovation—a symbol of how we can shape our future together through the power of technology and sustainability.
Joya Berrow’s video installation of plants and fungi, ‘Where Two Kingdoms Meet’, use forms of audio excavation to reveal this dark cosmos below us as a place of clatter and chatter. There’s a singing compost heap with its snapping static, the fizzing scurries of a cactus, and what could be a digitised Druidic chant to accompany Miranda Whall’s data from an upland soil sensor.
LOVE HULTÉN : A Desert Songs translates biodata from organic material into MIDI. Tiny changes in electrical current – the plants act as variable resistors. Cacti was used for this project due to their very sparse and sporadic activity. The cacti garden includes a few different specimens hooked up to probes, and outputs for individual plants can be changed as you go using patch points upfront. The MIDI signals are sent to a Korg NTS-1. A custom MIDI visualizer was made mimicking chloroplasts under microscope.
The artistic project 《微生》 created by Yu Qiu, highlights the urgent issues we are currently facing—many of which stem from human arrogance. We have long regarded ourselves as the rulers of nature, extracting and exploiting it excessively, forgetting that we are in fact part of an entangled existence, deeply interconnected with the natural world.
Non-human forces in nature are often hidden beneath the surface, excluded from human-centered frameworks of action and decision-making. The pressing challenges of our time compel us to shift away from anthropocentric modes of thought. A change in perspective can lead to a change in how we act. If we remain immersed in a human-centered worldview, we risk ignoring the diverse voices and complex realities within nature. In doing so, we neglect the survival and rights of the “other.”
Just like the whispering of trees, we are reminded that “the environment is alive—it is a constantly shifting network of beings, each with its own purpose, all coexisting in mutual dependence.” The consciousness of all living things in nature should be acknowledged and understood, because we are bound together in symbiogenesis, sharing both vulnerability and origin.
Acoustic Garden at SIGGRAPH 2024 – Yufan Xie
Adding Internal Details Based on Mood Board Research
In this part of the design, I aimed to make the internal state of the plant perceptible to viewers. Inspired by the structure of Arabidopsis mesophyll cells, I modeled a series of organic forms embedded in the stem to suggest active cellular zones. These forms are not just decorative; they represent the functional complexity of plant cells.
Plant cells are not passive containers, they are living systems responsible for vital processes such as photosynthesis, storage, and cell-to-cell communication. The vacuoles store water, ions, and nutrients essential to the plant’s survival and response. Meanwhile, structures like plasmodesmata (small channels in the cell wall) allow plant cells to share chemical signals, hormones, and electrical impulses, forming an internal communication network.
These internal signal exchanges are key to how plants “speak,” sense, and respond to their environment. By bringing these processes outward into the visible surface of the model, I hope to express the hidden agency of plant life, the idea that plants are not silent or inert, but constantly processing, reacting, and adapting. These cellular zones act as visual metaphors for an inner voice, pulsing quietly beneath the skin of the plant.
Cortex-Inspired Structural Design
In this step, I began designing a microstructural prototype inspired by the cortex layer of the plant stem. The cortex is a transitional zone that lies between the epidermis and the vascular system, playing a key role in transporting and storing nutrients, and serving as a channel for biochemical signals. Its high level of internal activity made it the ideal reference point for developing a visual language of plant vitality.
To emphasise the agency of the plant’s root-stem system, I constructed a series of porous, semi-organic structures that wrap around and extend from the stem and branches. These forms suggest material exchange, signal flow, and energetic transformation taking place beneath the surface. Rather than depicting internal anatomy directly, I focused on evoking a sense of dynamic biological processes through abstract geometry.
This approach allowed me to treat the stem not as a static support but as an active interface, a living infrastructure that senses, transports and adapts. The design is both architectural and organic, merging the biological reference of the cortex with a speculative vision of what internal plant intelligence might look like when brought to the surface.
Combined the inspiration into my sketch drawing
Combine into my 3D modelling process
Visual output
Adding material(color for my virtual plant)- Final Outcome ：
At this stage of the project, I completed the colouring and material design of the virtual plant model. To do this, I used BlenderKit, a free and open-source material library extension for Blender, distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). BlenderKit provides access to a wide range of node-based materials and assets, which I had become familiar with during my Foundation year. This prior experience allowed me to quickly navigate its interface and efficiently assign materials to different parts of the model.
I assigned different materials to specific plant elements, such as petals, buds, and stems, to visually distinguish their biological functions. The petals and buds were rendered in translucent lavender and violet tones, evoking delicacy, light sensitivity, and the ephemeral nature of flowering. These colour choices were inspired by the evening primrose, a plant known for blooming at dusk and releasing a sweet fragrance to attract night pollinators.
For the stem and root system, I selected deep green and moss-like textures to evoke organic mass and nutrient flow, reinforcing the stem’s role as a conduit for internal signalling and metabolic activity. These material decisions were not purely aesthetic, they are conceptually grounded in the idea of the plant as an active organism, constantly processing, transporting, and adapting, even in a digital context.
By using BlenderKit, I was able to explore surface reflectivity, translucency, and subtle specular qualities, adding a sense of moisture and life to the digital form. The final appearance integrates previous structural and conceptual decisions into a unified visual statement, a virtual organism, capable of suggesting inner movement and biological purpose.
Reference:
Buzzing Bees Make Evening Primrose Flowers Sweeter: https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2019/8/19/buzzing-bees-make-evening-primrose-flowers-sweeter
Paul Patton (2020) Do Plants Have Ears? : https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/do-plants-have-ears.php
Steckel, L.E., Sosnoskie, L.M. and Steckel, S.J., 2019. Common evening-primrose (Oenothera biennis L.). Weed Technology, 33(5), pp.757-760.
Veits, M., Khait, I., Obolski, U., Zinger, E., Boonman, A., Goldshtein, A., Saban, K., Seltzer, R., Ben‐Dor, U., Estlein, P. and Kabat, A., 2019. Flowers respond to pollinator sound within minutes by increasing nectar sugar concentration. Ecology letters, 22(9), pp.1483-1492.
Thiago Mazza – https://www.instagram.com/gearyartcrawl/p/DAMbJEmygeH
Thijs Biersteker ‘Voice of Nature‘ :https://thijsbiersteker.com/voice-of-nature
LOVE HULTÉN: Desert Songs https://www.lovehulten.com/desertsongs.html
Acoustic Garden at SIGGRAPH 2024 – Yufan Xie : https://yufanxie.com/project/acoustic-garden/
微声 – Yu Qiu – https://cafa.com.cn/cn/news/details/8331577
RIKEN led group successfully track dynamic changes in organelles using 3D images of whole plant cells: https://sj.jst.go.jp/news/202212/n1206-01k.html
Midorikawa, K., Tateishi, A., Toyooka, K., Sato, M., Imai, T., Kodama, Y. and Numata, K., 2022. Three-dimensional nanoscale analysis of light-dependent organelle changes in Arabidopsis mesophyll cells. PNAS nexus, 1(5), p.pgac225.
Matte Risopatron, J.P., Sun, Y. and Jones, B.J., 2010. The vascular cambium: molecular control of cellular structure. Protoplasma, 247, pp.145-161.
Mancuso, S. and Viola, A., 2015. Brilliant green: the surprising history and science of plant intelligence. Island Press.
Fromm, J. and Lautner, S., 2007. Electrical signals and their physiological significance in plants. Plant, cell & environment, 30(3), pp.249-257.
Geckogreen., 2024 –10 Types of Beautiful Night-Blooming Plants
BlenderKit – https://github.com/BlenderKit/BlenderKit
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