Assignment - September - Phase 2 : Bucket of Water

Welcome back! I write this in the wee hours of Sunday morning. It's 3:21am, and I'm still wide awake. This is most likely due to my cold, which is forcing me to consistently drink warm/hot drinks.

Unfortunately, I forgot to pick up some hot choc at Tescos... leaving tea as the only other option. And so I have made a nice cheese toastie and a cuppa, and sit down to the Coldplay's "A Rush of Blood to the Head", some of which I'm learning on keyboard too...

In light of my new idea for September's picture; the first step was to create a bucket or water (Where the leaf would be floating), not to be confused with "Glass of Water", one of Coldplay's awesome new tracks for their E.P. later this month. It doesn't help that they released minute excerpts of the some of the songs; only serving to exacerbate my obsession. It did make my Thursday though. Anyhoo, visions of a wooden bucket flitted through my mind. Time to get building!

A run-of-the-mill metal pail just seemed weak. Metal doesn't seem to 'fit' Autumn nicely. Certainly it wouldn't work as well for the image. One made of wooden strips seemed more viable, though a little more labour-intensive. It's pretty easy though. The first step was to create a panel: basically a tall, thin box. Clone several, several times... and work from there.

The consistency of the circular shape was made easy with the pivot point. If you look at the top-left view (View of the Top), you can see that the panels were facing the origin (0, 0) and off centre. If the pivot point was moved to this point, then the further panels would rotate around this. Quite the time saver. It also really helped with consistency.

And there it is! Although it looks more like a tube than a bucket. Overestimated the panel height methinks. No worries...

...A quick parameter change and that's the height sorted. To help create more of a bucket shape, each panel was rotated out slightly. This of course made large holes between the panels, pretty much inviting water to leak out and soak my desktop. That might explain why I failed woodwork...



The metal 'strips' that go around the bucket were simply made from a couple of cones. Easily done.

A hole was then punched into the top-most rim, so that the bucket would not be sealed (Bit of a useless bucket if it was). Pro-Boolean and another cylinder made things nice and easy.

Then in a seemingly pointless move, I filled the hole back up. I haven't lost the plot (A moot point, but for example's sake, let's assume I haven't). There is some logic behind this.

Those who've been following the blog and the tutorials might recognise these textures. The small one on the left was used for the pool table, and the right one for the snail shell. Why make new textures when you can recycle old ones?

And there's the basic textured result! The snooker table texture worked best for this one (Much lighter). The water was made from a 'translucent shader', blending several mixes of blue and turquoise, with a high specular level. You can now see why filling the hole in again was a good idea. You can now see the inside 'band' of the bucket, adding a little bit more realism to it, rather than just a bunch of planks being held together by pixels and good will.

It was tested in 3DS Max with the leaf, and was a little on the thin side. No worries. Bit of fun with the 'scale' tool quickly had this one catered for. Here's where it starts to get fun...

Water isn't the most compliant of components when it comes to 3D. Much like leaves, it insists on inconsistency and non-linear shapes. I have reason to believe that both are plotting against the 3D world. Either way, a leaf floating on still water would appear pretty unrealistic... either that or the leaf knows levitation. I'd hazard a guess that most people would believe the former...

Pond ripples aren't the easiest things to make in 3DS Max. What was simpler was to have more fun with the 'bump' tool. First step was to make a ripple in Photoshop. This is easier than it looks. Starting off with a black-white gradient to coat the canvas, all that's required is some 'Zig Zag' Distortion from the 'Filter' menu. Set the properties and that's pretty much it! Now set that as a bump on the water texture aaaaand...

There we have it! A nice little circular ripple in the water. The high specular level also adds to the effect, as it now highlights the trim of the ripples. Perfect!

As the image was going to capture more a corner of the bucket, the ripple ideally needed to be slightly off-centre, to allow the leaf to be more at the edge, than smack-bang in the middle. This was done with the UVW Map tool. Place one on, then unwrap it. From the side-menu, hit 'Edit', and you can move where the texture appears on the object. here, I placed the disk a little bit off centre.

And there it is! A ripple to one side of the bucket! The bucket's holes are a little bit more obvious from this close, but the ripple hopefully draws attention away from it. To finish, it's time to add the first bit of the image: The leaf!

And there it is! Merged into this project. A few tweaks, re-scaling and singing loudly to myself later; the leaf is now gently resting in a bucket of water. Pretty, and just begging for a centrepiece to top it off. Let's get cracking!

And I'm afraid that I'm going to call it a night now. I ideally wanted to post up all the work (To confess, September's image is complete), but am actually sleepy and bunged up... so will get some sleep and finish uploading all of this tomorrow.

'night people. Browse safely