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Juicy Oranges
How ya doing?
Welp, like most humans in our field — I’m striving to become better with the programs I use.
**BACKGROUND INFO**
I’m working on a personal project right now which I thought would be easy—but its actually turning out quite difficult (its honeslty probably easy, I’m just overthinking it).
Anyway—I’m trying to make a photo realistic orange. (ok ok, thats easy…) but I’m animating it so it slowly falls apart (now we’re getting tougher). The animation would be an orange rolling on the ground, then half the orange falls off, then slowly a wedge falls off (like 1/8th of a pizza).
picture to illustrate different phases of this orange:
https://i.imgur.com/3FeHke1.jpg(a. full orange b. half orange c. wedge comes off orange)
ok so here are the issues I’m running into:
**ISSUES IM HAVING**
1.) Cutting an orange in half doesn’t seem to be hard topology wise…but taking out a wedge (phase 3) while maintaining good topology is MIND BOGGLING. I can’t seem to figure out the best way to take a sphere and cut it up into all three phases. I’ve been taught to stay away from booleans for animation/topology purposes… but DAMN I can’t figure out a clean way to do it without booleons!!!! ARGHHHH (This is probably the hardest thing about this project for me)
2.) When the orange splits in half (phase b) the inside of the orange is shown. I want this orange to be the juiciest orange on the planet. I tried just putting a scanned texture in the color channel but that doesn’t give it the “JUICY” factor. There are highlights int he pulp that really bring out the “realness” and I cant find a way to emulate that. Do you think I can get away with a texture on a sphere cut in half or would I have to model all the juice paplets / pockets (my fruit anatomy is horrid, sorry).
Thanks for your help. I can’t wait to become better with c4d! 🙂
Cheers,
Ryan -
2 Replies
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1. use the Split command, select the polys you want to go in a slice and choose Split which makes a new object from the selected polys (it also leaves them in the original object so erase them there). Now on the original and the new slice use the Create polygon tool to fill in the sides you want.
2. wetness is all about Specular and Bump/Displacement – unless you get way too close good specular/bump/displacement map(s) is/are a lot easier than making all the orange bits.
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I agree with Brian.
I might recommend keeping the original geometry and a copy of the orange after being split so that you have the option of transitioning from a whole orange to the split orange. That may prove useful if you run into phong angle issues down the road.
I like using Reflection instead of Specular if I have the time. Specular is an approximation of light reflections the upside being that it’s inexpensive to render. However, with true reflections you can actually see the shape of the object (light) being reflected. Of course having lights appear in reflections either requires Area Lights with “Visible in Reflections” enabled or geometry with luminance. Sometimes if I want some fast lighting but nice reflections I will make some luminous geometry a child of a point light and set it to be Excluded by the light.
Darby Edelen
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