Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Project 8
Create a Snail
One of the nicest things that the computer graphics scienists have achieved is the possibility of
mixing computer generated images with live footage. For this to be possible, there are a lot of
aspects that must be correctly controlled and some quite sophisicated shading methods that
must be used. Let's now work on creaing a small snail and composite it over an empty leaf in
real footage to get a good grasp of how complex a project of this kind can be.
Mission Briefing
We'll be creaing a snail from scratch, seing the shaders for the shell and the body to have
a realisic look, and then composite it over live footage in order to give it some nice place
to live.
What Does It Do?
With this project, we are going to learn some very nice techniques and tricks of the trade to
use in future 3D projects.
The snail's shell will be created using a basic method for doing parametric modeling,
which will allow us to have a very high degree of control and, at the same ime, avoid the
complicated (and boring) issues of trying to do it by hand. We will then improve on the basic
shape achieved with this technique by using some hand tweaking and the always-useful
sculping tools.
The shading part will require us to create a simple UV Unwrap from the shell mesh and
learn to use the procedural textures in a quite sophisicated way, giving us very good results
without having to resort to hand-painted textures that would require us to have a good deal
of paining ability. We'll be using the
Subsurface Scattering
opion a lot, which is available
in Blender and very useful for creaing realisic organic shaders.
