Seasons..

The Seasons

I have chosen the seasons July, September and January for my 3d renders. These months will be used to show Summer (July), Autumn (September) and Winter (January). July, being the month of my birthday has the most memories for me, and there are a lot of ideas I can use to represent this month, like summer time and holidays. September is the month when the weather starts to turn colder and the leaves fall off trees, and we get closer to winter. I then chose January, one of the coldest months of the year when it snows most often. There is also the New Year beginning on this month, so many celebrations take place.

Fruit Bowl Updated

Here is the finished version of the actual fruit bowl. I have added a bunch of bananas which I created using the cyclinder tool, and then converting to an editable mesh, which I pinched the ends and curved it round so it was banana shaped. I then added the texture of a banana onto it to make it even more bananary.

My Fruit Bowl

Fruit Bowl

This is my fruit bowl so far. Most of the fruit I made was created by using the spherical tool and then adding a texture to it. The bowl was made using a torus which i made very thin, then put a flat cylinder on the bottom, then gave them both a wood texture. I thought about making the bowl by somehow creating a sphere and editing it into the shape of a bowl, but when i tried this it worked better in theory than on paper. I found it much easier to make the bowl with 2 different objects but with the same texture.

With the orange, which was the first piece I made, I drew a sphere and then found a picture of an orange. I then put the image onto the ball, but as a texture. It looked pretty impressive by then, but I added a green top to it, where it would have been joined to the tree. This was an easy way of creating a fruit with little knowledge of the software by this point. The texture was also quite reflective like that of a real orange, and you can see where the light is shining off it.

After this I made the grapes, which took a lot longer. Basically, I began by making a sphere again, but much smaller this time. I then cloned it many times and started moving them around into positions which looked like the fruit would grow in. It took a while to make sure the grapes were touching but not going inside each other. I then used the cylinder tool to make the stalks/vines of the grapes and connect them up. This also took a while as the vines looked like they were connected in one view, but in other views it was clear that they were not. Finally I took a picture of a grape, and, using the image, applied it as a texture to each of the spheres. I also did this for the vines, with a zoomed in image of a vine, to get the correct colour.

Next I just selected and cloned the same bunch of grapes, and rotated them and moved them to a different position to make the fruit bowl a bit more full.

Then I started work on the apple. Initially I tried making it with the spherical tool again, but it was clear this would not work. A much more effective way of creating the apple is to use the torus tool, and then creating it quite fat and tall so it appears not to have a hole in the middle. This creates the groove in the top of apple, making it more apple shaped. I then made a sphere which went inside the torus, but was much smaller, just to make the groove in the top appear stop at a point, so it wasnt too deep. I then took a picture of an apple and stretched it to full size. Then imported it as a texture again and applied it to the torus and the sphere. I then added a stalk to the top to make it even more like a typical apple, and gave it the same texture as I gave the grape vines.

Next I will attempt a banana, which I am having a little difficulty with at the moment.