This week I decided to add more elements to my design that I had researched last week. I also wanted to add more details such as realistic textures. I need practice with UVs specifically so I decided this would be great development for this project and for myself.
Firstly, I thought about details I could add which would make my animation make more sense in terms of practicality. I thought I needed to make a structure behind the gears as it didn’t make sense they would be able to turn against a wall. I decided to create a pipe structure behind them being this would also add more detail to the animation visually. I started by creating pipes on the walls in the edges, which would lead into the pipes on the gears. I then had to make three main pipes that would hold up the gears, and make connecting pipes to hold up the smaller gears.
I then made the pipes behind the gears more rounded, and it took a while of playing around with the pipes for them all to fit. I had to craft a different peice for the bottom left gear to connect to the pipe structure because of the width of the radius inside of the gear.
I then looked at texturing the pipes. I downloaded a metal texture that I could use for these, and opened the UV editor. I unwrapped the pipes and adjusted their positioning on the UV screen, and had ro scale it up so that the details were seen and the texture didn’t look stretched.
I initiallty wanted to go ahead with the pastel colour of this metal, however when inputted this into the scene it blended in too much with the background so I colour corrected the metal to be a light grey. I applied this to all the pipes on the gear structure also.
I then textured the gears. i wanted these to look more realistic and less superficial. I downlaoded a variety of worn metal textures as I wanted some variety and for not all the gears to look the same. I opened the UV editor for these and it was much more simple for the gears. I individually textured all of them and I just had to adjust the gear to be in the middle of the UV grid for these to work.
The animation now looked more realistic and had much more detail than before.