Week 8: Ball of wool

Originally I thought the ball of wool was not going to be hard at all to model, but when it came down to it the ball of wool proved to be one of the hardest things to do. My first attempt was to start of with a sphere and then apply a texture to the sphere, but the texture I had chosen to use was not mapping to the sphere in the way that I wanted it to. So I tried changing the attributes to the texture in Photoshop, but the result that I got made this butterfly effect pattern and that made the ball of wool look worse.

I then tried to build up a ball of wool by using small cylindrical shapes. That didn't work either because when I was overlapping the shapes some of them were cutting through others. It had got to the point where we had said that if nothing works then we would just use a sphere.

I then went back to the first idea and searched the Internet to find a good enough wool texture for our ball. After looking for a while I was able to find one which worked really well with the cylindrical mapping tool, the only thing now was the fact that the texture colour was white and I had always imagined the ball of wool to be red to add some colour contrast to our environment. So I took the texture and manipulated it through Photoshop, saved it and applied it again to the sphere.

I also thought it would be cool to make the ball of wool glow slightly so that the audience can identify that this is what is intriguing the cat; and to enhance the fact that the cat is supposed to be oblivious of the current destruction that has gone on around him.

I made a bump map for the ball of wool to also make it look more noticeable as a ball of wool. I also had to check what the model looked like close up, because our first shot is an extreme close up and the model needed to be detailed enough to make that first shot look good enough.