Melanie Estes: Week 1 Castle

View 1

     After finding the Rhino tool that allows you to make a helix curve, I used it to make a spiral candy. stick I then modeled other forms of candy while using the following references:
gummy bear, peppermint, graham cracker, ribbons, chocolate, caramel, lollipop, spiral candy, orange slice, and orange wedge, starburst, and gumballs, gumdrops, and jelly beans. I also made twizzlers, marshmallows, and M&Ms. I created all of these individual pieces and used them as the building materials for the castle.

Ghosted painted black - view 1

Ghosted painted black - view 2

Ghosted painted black - view 1

Layer assignments

     I relied heavily on boolean operations and the filet edge tool to make the candy. For example, the gumdrop is a truncated cone with the edges fileted. The twizzler is a long cylinder with other smaller cylinders subtracted using boolean difference. The graham cracker is a box with cylinders and small rectangles subtracted to make holes, with all of the edges fileted. Some candies have simple shapes too; the gumball is only a sphere, and the jelly bean is a rebuilt sphere with some points shrunken in. The orange wedge, however, was made by drawing the shape of the indention with curves, planar the curve, and extruded surface, and then using that to subtract with from the general wedge shape. The stained glass window was make by projecting the outline of the lollipop onto a box and splitting it into separate pieces. The caramel was made with a series of boolean difference and boolean union using truncated cones and cylinders. The moat was made by cage editing a plane to move some points up and others down to simulate small waves, and extruding the surface down.

View 2

     The brick for the entire castle is made of stacked starburst. When created the rounded towers, I used polar array to position the first layer in a circle. After making the first two rows, I duplicated and translated them until I had large boxes and cylinders. Two stacked marshmallows is the same height as one starburst. I made the windows by deleting some of the pieces and adding marshmallows for support. I used twizzlers cut in half as framing for some of the windows. I used the fruit pieces as window decorations and added rectangular window panes to all windows. To make the trim around the top of the castle, I cut a spiral stick in half and duplicated it around. I used M&Ms as the trim at the bottom of the castle. I used graham crackers for all of the doors and roofing. For the round towers, I trimmed a sheet of graham crackers and closed the holes using the edge curve tool. The doorknobs are jelly beans and the bushes by the doors are gumdrops. The trim of the roof is made of twizzlers and gumballs. The trim around the large stained glass window is duplicated caramel. The corning pieces of much of the trim is a peppermint. The three flags use a toothpick pole and a rotated candy corn. The wall surrounding the castle is made of chocolate bars, twizzler posts, and peppermints on top. The front gates are mounted on two spiral sticks topped with a gumball.  The bridge over the moat is also a chocolate bar. The ground is made of simple cylinders with fileted edges. The tools i used most when building the castle were mirror, array polar, and copy and paste.

View 3

     I chose the colors and added textures based on the reference examples used. I chose the color of the starburst and M&Ms based on the original colors of the candies. The gumdrops are green to simulate bushes with a fractal noise bump map. The starburst have a scratch bump map while the graham crackers have a granite bump map. The marshmallows have a noise color pattern using white and a slight brown, as if toasted. Much of the candy materials are hard shiny plastic, because most candy truly is shiny. The gummy bears, twizzlers, and orange slices are cloudy clear plastic. The stained glass window uses a scratched metal and multiple colors of clear plastic. The fruit slices were not being illuminated as I had hoped, so I added an extra piece of geometry in the shape of a stretched sphere so I could add a light material. I positioned it near the ceiling inside the castle. The twists are all the same plastic material, but in different colors, to come to look like a whole piece, when they are really separate pieces in order to divide the colors. The moat is made of soft shiny plastic and is colored brown to be melted chocolate. The ground is green and uses noise for both the color and bump maps to resemble grass.

View 4