(lazy western music) (clock beeps) - What is the holdup? - Ugh, 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 Ana, I'm also a shading artist. This lesson is about patterns, which we use 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 modeled
three-dimensional objects, but they don't have surface
characteristics yet. - [Ana] We create and apply the textures that make our characters and sets seem like they're made
out of something real. - [Beth] The word seem
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. - [Beth] And a lot of times, that quality is actually a pattern. (playful bongo music) - When we begin creating a surface, we usually start by looking
at reference images, or things from the real world. - [Beth] 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. In The Good Dinosaur, Arlo was supposed to feel young and fresh. We actually used the succulent plant called Titanoplis, 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 formed 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 displaced 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
used some interesting techniques that we'll 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 this baguette. (playful accordion music)