I really want a palm tree in this scene. There are a few different styles of palm tree that I could use. I think I’ll go with the ones I remember from southern California. They aren’t the tropical style that the leaves are really long and droopy. The leaves on these are rounder, the fronds still droop but the leaf looks more like a big fan. Hmm. How to model this.
Once I decided which type of palm tree I wanted I had to work out, how I was going to model it. Fortunately, I am not animating this scene because I think it is going to take a long time to render just one view. I think I’m just going to have to model the leaves for the palm tree, individually. It sounds bad, and probably not efficient. However, I don’t recall these types of palm trees having that many leaves so it may not be so bad. The trunk now, that will be another story. For now, I need to figure out how to create these leaves.
As I said the leaf for this palm tree, and I apologize to those gardeners and horticulturist that might be reading this, I do not know the name of this variety of palm tree, anyway, the leaves are fairly round. A good shape to start with might be something circular. I don’t need a lot of geometry for thickness but I need to make the fronds and the stem that comes out from the tree so I need a fair amount of segments around. So I started with a cylinder. I did basically the same thing I did with the pine tree. I selected the faces or polygons around the edge, or the thickness, and I extruded them by polygon. What I did different was this time Instead of selecting the faces all the way around I selected a little over half of them to extrude. Then I extruded the face that was halfway in between those and extruded it. This gave me a basice shape. Which you can see from the bottom leaf in this picture.
You can also see how they are sort of creased in the middle. I did two things to get this. Initially I selected one half of the object and rotated it so as to get some bend. Then I selected the edges through the center of the leaf and the stem and used the soft select tool and adjusted them down. That served to add to the creasing effect.
Once the fronds were extruded I needed a bit more geometry to work with so I added some edge loops to each one that way I could bend them and shape them more easily. From there it was a lot of fiddly work. I would select a frond up to the edge loop close to the body of the leaf and then rotate it to give it some bend. Then that same selection would have to be transposed, moved up or down or sometimes a little farther out so it was longer, or even side to side. Then I would deselect that farthest from the end, close to the body of the leaf edge loop and theside edges that connected it to the next farthest edge loop and I would do the same thing. I did each frond this way.
While I tried to be smart about making the leaves, I wasn’t as smart as I could be. I did make the base leaf and then copy it to create another one. And I decided to make only about 3 or 4 different leaves and then just duplicate them for as many as I want. However, I did do all the tweaking and fiddling on the fronds on each leaf. They all started with their fronds sticking straight out. If I had been a little more efficient I would have created the first one complete, then copied it and adjusted the fronds here and there and then copied and made another. I think it would have been less work. That’s not what I did.
I created the trunk of the palm tree also from a cylinder. I did the samething with it as I did with the Christmas/Pine tree to create the bits that stick out. On the palm tree that bark type stuff that sticks out is I think from when they trim the leaves off. They cut them back only so far and just leave the rest. Anyway, it makes for good character. So I got the bits extruded and then angled them up. I also did some rotating on the end polygons to give a better angle to the bits. When I applied turbosmooth they were a bit too pointy and I wanted them a little more rounded or squared so I added extra edge loops all around to get that.
I did that for the top, where I will attach the palm leaves and the base of the tree.
Then of course I needed to see what it was going to look like with the leaves on the tree so I moved all of them that I had modeled over to the trunk and rotated and transposed them into spots where they were sticking out from the stumps at the top.
It’s looking pretty cool to me. I kind of excited about it now. I have one more leaf to finish tweaking and then I will need to start copying them and adding them until I have just the 
right amount. I don’t think it will take too many palm leaves but a few more will help.
The palm tree has been taking the longest to get modeled. Partly because of interuptions and partly due to the fiddliness of the process. Sometimes that happens and it can be a challenge to not give up and go a different direction. But staying course and working towards the vision I have for this piece is paying off. I am really pleased with the way the palm leaves are turning out.