Week 5- Adding Colours and Textures

I felt the next step was to add colours to the playground equipment. I have thought about the types of colours I want to use and have decided to use a combination of bright colours together to make it exciting for the children.

See Saw

I have decided to use red and yellow for this. To start I created the yellow texture which I wanted to resemble a slightly dull plastic. For this I used an anistropic shader with a specular level of 30, gloss level of 5 and anisotropy level of 20.

For the bar across I thought a painted metal would be realistic and suit the object and so created it in red. I once again used the anisotropic shade with a specular level of 50, glossiness level of 10 and anisotropy level of 70.


Slide

I was going for a realistic appearance for the slide and so started with the slide. I tried to create a dark metal similar to how I imagine iron to be. Once again I used an anisotropic shader and chose a mid shade of grey. I changed the specular amount to 150, gloss amount to 40 and anisotropic amount to 65. When I rendered the scene the slide had a surface like I wanted.

Next I thought about the colours I could use on the rest of the slide. As the metal part had an appearance which would be dull to my target group I wanted the rest to be more exciting. Due to this I made the handlebars red. With the anisotropic shader I set the specular level to 60 and glossiness to 10.

For the steps I used the anisotropic shader to produce a plastic material. For this I set the specular and gloss amount to 10 and the anisotropic amount to 50.


Roundabout

For the roundabout I wanted to create a really fun look, especially as it will be the central object in the playground. Due to this I used bright, contrasting colours. I decided that it would not wise to use the green for the base as I plan to place the park on grass. As a result I’ll be creating a red plastic material for the base.

I selected the anisotropic shader and used a specular level of 20 and a gloss and anisotropy amount of 50. I then repeated these settings for the seat material, but changed the colour to a bright green.

I thought the handle bars of a real roundabout would most likely to be made of metal and so tired to created a painted metal material for these parts. I set the specular level to 70 and gloss level of 10 and anisotropy level of 50 to get the reflectiveness amount I was looking for. For this material I tired the exact same shade of green and red which I used previously for this piece of equipment and picked the red as I felt it worked best.

At this point I was reasonably pleased with the colours, but felt the material of the seat was not quite right. To me it appeared to be slightly slippery which would not be safe for a child’s playground. Due to this I recreated the green texture, but added a bump map with the preset noise map. I selected the object XYZ setting and changed the tile size to 40. Lastly I applied this material to only the top surface of each seat using the polygon selection method from the editable poly menu.


Swing

So far I have used a lot of red and so this time wanted to use different colours, but ones which still worked with the other equipment. When I opened the file I quite liked the preset colours and felt they went well with the rest of the scene. Due to this I tried to recreate these colours but adapted them slightly.

Firstly I created a bluey purple colour which would look like painted metal. As a similar material was created well with the anisotropic shader previously I decided to use it again. I found the values which worked best were a specular level of 50, glossiness of 10 and anisotropy level of 70.

I felt the material most likely to be used to make a swing seat would be rubber and so I tried to recreate this in the materials editor. I chose a colour slightly closer to red and applied a specular value of 35, glossiness value of 3 and anisotropy level of 5.

To complete the swing I created a dark iron like metal material using the anisotropic shader for the chains. I increased the specular level to 250 and gloss level of 10.


Bench

For the bench I was trying to create a traditional style and used some of the preset bitmaps as materials. I started by creating the wooden planks which go across the supports and applied the wood preset as a bump map. I set the grain size to 7 and the tile size to 7 with the world XYZ setting. Lastly I selected beige as the diffuse colour.

For the supports I tried to create the appearance of concrete using dent bitmap as the bump map. For this I set the tile size to 9 with the object XYZ setting. I set the parameter size to 200, strength to 20 and iterations to 2. Finally I added an off white as the surface colour.


Helter-Skelter

I have decided to use more colours than I have on previous objects as this has many more parts and will hopefully link this with the other apparatus. Therefore I will incorporate shades of green, blue and purple.

I began by working on the slide and tried to create a green plastic. To do this I used an anisotropic shader. I set the specular amount to 35 and glossiness amount to 10 while the anisotropic level to 25. I was pleased with this in the material editor, but when I applied it to the slide I was not as pleased as the join between the two parts became visible.

I tried to resolve this by extruding the end of the main part of the slide to the value of 80 and used the move tool to place it in the direction I wanted before removing the smaller part at the base. I then aligned the box so that it completed the slide as it did previously.

Next I went on to create a material for the roof. I chose to use a bold blue which would look like a plastic with a slight sheen. For this I used the anisotropic shader and used the same settings as I did on the slide.

After this I looked at the helter-skelter as a whole and felt the colours in use worked quite well together. Due to this I have used similar colours to this for these parts.

Firstly I made an olive green material for the stairs and tried to give it the appearance of dull painted metal. To do this I used the anisotropic shader and set the specular level to 60, gloss level to 15 and anisotropic level to 70. When I applied this material to the steps I felt it worked really well as it will link the yellow and green objects in the scene.

Lastly I created another painted metal material, this time in lilac and for the safety bars. I wanted the appearance to be the same as on the steps as they are the same thing, especially as they are next to each other. Due to this I used the same shader and settings as for the material on the stairs.

After I applied the colours to the objects I realised the central support did not go all the way to the top. Due to this I created a cylinder and made the radius the same as the central column and increased the height so it reached the roof.