We're re-imagining these as lights for the botanist. The red bulbs store light during the day and release it at night. So we'll be hanging these around the space to serve as his night lights!
I've been playing with different techniques for texturing to get the right look. The pattern is actually pretty specific, but still extremely varied.
The plant on the left is supposed to be in transition between ripe and decaying. Tha'ts using a layered texture. The problem is that transparency doesn't carry through on inputs to the layered texture, so we'll have to find another solution. It would be a simple plugin to build in Maya, so that might be the way to go.
To get variation in local shaping, I'm using a simple lattice deformer. After a few minutes of tweaking I was satisfied that we'll be able to quickly generate a variety of shapes for the external shell.
