Class Practical - Materials Part 1

In this weeks practical, we covered the basics of materials and how to manipulate them for different results.

The first exercise was to create a cube with specular light bouncing of it. In order for the cube to have specular attributes, it needs to use a material which can bounce light, like a blinn in this case. I decided to make my cube a darker colour for the shape and set the specular colour to purple.

In the render, you may notice it is difficult to see, I have done this intentionally to demonstrate the purple tint you can see on the top left of the cube, whereas the rest of the cube is harder to see because it is much darker and blends in with the background.

 

Moving on to the next exercise, applying bitmaps. This exercise involved the simplest form of texturing and demonstrated how certain shapes can react differently when the same texture is applied. The shapes I used were the; CUBE, SPHERE, CYLINDER, TORUS, CONE and PYRAMID polygon primitives. The texture is a simple chess board like image file.

In the image above is an example of how all the shapes reacted. You can physically see how the texture applied on each shape. The cube is absolutely perfect compared to the rest of the shapes. With the torus and sphere, you can see how the central / inner areas have smaller checker pattern and as the shape opens up, the pattern slightly stretches out. The cylinder has a similar but more extreme case, where the flat parts are neat, however, the curves are entirely stretched out. The cone and the pyramid had the most awkward results. They both tended to spiral up towards the point of the object.

The last exercise was to experiment with procedural maps. The procedural maps I experimented with, in order are;  FRACTAL, BROWNIAN, MARBLE, NOISE, GRANITE, CLOUD, CRATER and OCEAN.

These are all projected onto polygon planes. Once I applied these maps, I noticed that the parameters heavily impact the way they are shown, or in some cases rendered.