Introduction to Patterns

what is the holdup ah shading artists at the salad bar they just get a little too involved is it a fractal I think so that puffy shape repeats itself oh maybe we should talk about this somewhere else I'm Beth I'm a shading artist and I'm Anna I'm also shading artist this lesson is about patterns which were used in shading all the time shading is creating the surface appearance of all the stuff you see in our films cars bugs trees aliens they all start out as modeled 3-dimensional objects but they don't have surface characteristics yet we create and apply the textures that make our characters and sets seem like they're made out of something real the words seam is really important here because we're not trying to recreate reality exactly we're trying to capture the essential qualities of a surface that make it feel believable and a lot of times that quality is actually a pattern when we begin creating a surface we usually start by looking at reference images or things from the real world we look at a few different qualities color illumination which is how the surface reacts to light and displacement how bumpy or smooth it is let's talk about how we did that with Arlo and the good dinosaur Arlo was supposed to feel young and fresh we actually use the succulent plant called titan' appleís as a reference for his skin looking closely at the plant we were able to deconstruct what made it feel right for Arlo first of all there was a series of cells that form the main feature of the pattern in terms of color these cells had one color in the cell itself and the ring around the cell was a darker color the surface of the plant was shiny but it wasn't a sharp shine it was a soft shine finally the cells that made up the main pattern were this place from the surface so it was kind of bumpy once we figure out these main features we started creating a pattern however to make the pattern feel organic we needed to do something else to it add randomness believable randomness can be surprisingly difficult to achieve in computer graphics computers are great at modeling regular patterns but in nature most of the patterns you see have some variation or irregularity within their structure giving them a quality of controlled randomness getting that randomness into Arlo's shading was a big challenge but we use some interesting techniques that will share with you throughout the rest of this lesson and you'll get to use randomness to create and manipulate patterns of your own I bet after this they'll all start looking at the world like a shading artist hey check out the bubble pattern in the sky gap