Amanda Hammack, Week 8 Milestone

   This week's milestone was all about texturing. Before adding materials, though, I finished the most complex kart in the series (Princess's).

   To construct the tentacles, I started of with a spring located under dynamic objects. I then used the soft selection to shrink one end and to dip the middle. I selected one side of the object, added a placeholder material, and inset it by the polygon. With those edges still selected, I tesselated them, relaxed them, and added a second placeholder material to create the suckers.
   To construct the strings of pearls, I started with the hose object stored in the extended primitives and modified the parameters until the connected polygons were at their smallest point and the cycles were equal in length, heighth, and width. After that, I used the soft selection to twist the hose over the tentacles. I then deleted the polygons bridging each of the cycles, used the spherify modifier on each cycle, and capped them.
   To construct the wings, I located a photo of robotic bat wings. This image had a higher value because the simple connecting structures would be easier to outline. I applied the image to a plane and created another, transparent plane in order to outline the structures. I then altered the wings to better fit my concept art, extruded the bones, and added a shell modifier.

 
 Once Princess's kart was finished, I set about adding base materials to each of the karts. Although they do not yet actually have a texture applied, this will allow me to set up material ids, assign the necessary slots, and create an appropriate naming system. Early on, before I made the concept art, I designed a specific color pallet for each of the karts. This pallet became especially handy when I needed a material to assign each of the karts. By assigning the lighter colors of the pallet to the specular levels, I was able to stay mostly true to the color scheme.