Swing Shift

Well, I started with the grass tutorial which was fun…

And from there, I found some house plant tutorial and the raindrop/branch tutorial which I either got bored with or got distracted…  anyway, I left it after it started looking hairy and decided to move on, but using parts of both of these things.

So, after reading the passages in the book and having looked at all the plants around me, on my plants database and pondering basil, I decided to look at algae and see where that went.  I found this lovely pic which I really like the colors and texture (and decided I could use my branch/house plant base).  And also this nice mushroom…

I readjusted my houseplant/branch model to make the algae which is probably a bit more hostile looking than algae would normally be, but hey, it’s harsh on mars.  And they would have to manipulate it anyway.  (Yes, it does kind of look like crab legs or bugs or mutants… well, they are.)  Using the tricks from the grass tutorial, I used the scatter function (to a lesser degree, of course) to throw algae over a surface.  I then saved a jpeg/tif of the top view to use as texture files for backgrounds later on…  (I had first put the algae on a plane with the same textures I used in the last project, but decided it was a little much at this point.)

Now for the mushroom…

I took my little pic and put it in AutoCAD to trace half the shape, brought that into 3dsM and used the lathe modifier to get the shape.  Some tweeks here and there and that’s it.  The hardest part was the textures…  which I still haven’t gotten right, but they will do for now.  After that was all settled, I exported a few TIFS to use for the billboards and put the mushrooms into the file with the algae.  I put in a few planes to act as pseudo-shrooms and added my tifs to them… imported the sky from the last project, and put in a second ground plane with the pic of the scattered algae.  (I discovered – don’t know if this will hold true or not- that if you create a plane, scatter things on it, then resize the plane, the scattered objects will remain where they were unless you rechoose the distribute object.  That might not hold though… I didn’t test it thoroughly.)  Whoo-hoo.

Oh, and because I like to give myself a headache, I decided that the specimens should be in a jar.  Fun playing with textures… Oh, and ray tracing and scatter… not so good together with complex objects…

The final board: