For my first final piece, I decided to model the gumball machine. I split up my process into sections with a video each.
Firstly I had to model the main shape of the machine.
I used the taper deformer so that initially I could work in a non-destructive way, but shortly after I switched to edit mode to add the hole for the gumballs to come out of, and to separate the glass dome into the dome and the lid. I found this process pretty simple after doing the linked in learning tutorials the other day.
Next I had to fill the machine with gumballs. I knew that I needed to use the cloner tool but decided to figure it out with a single gumball before creating dozens. It was good that I did it this way because I came across a few problems that I had to troubleshoot. Firstly, my machine had been grouped into a null to make my workflow simpler, however, I didn’t know that the collider tag didn’t affect all the children of the null by default, so my ball kept falling straight through the piece. When I searched up a tutorial on how collision physics worked, it told me to change my settings and this problem was solved. Then I had another problem, the ball wouldn’t go into the dome. In another tutorial, I found out that this was because the mesh for the machine was on ‘automatic’ and so the software was assuming that the dome was solid. I changed it to ‘static mesh’ and this problem was solved.
Once this was sorted I could then start to fill the machine with the cloner. This was really easy and I found out that if I didn’t skip completely back to the start of the composition, the gumballs didn’t reset to their initial position. Using this knowledge I managed to mix them very thoroughly by replaying the sequence a few times, and I then set their initial state to be mixed instead of in the grid from the cloner.
Next, I modelled the ‘twisty thing’ (not sure on the technical term) that you put money in to dispense the gumballs. The main body was pretty easy, however, I had an issue with the Boole tool. In the past when I have used it, it has treated both shapes as solid shapes and left a solid hole, however this time it cut through the surface and left the whole shape hollow. This wasn’t really a problem because it looks okay, however I couldn’t find out how to fix it even with searching some forums.
Modelling the actual twistable handle was fun, I didn’t really pay attention to the reference photo, I just used my knowledge from my childhood to create something that looked like it would work. The deformer tools came in really handy again here, and I then edited it to indent some of the front faces and provide a bit of traction for the users.
With the use of the dope sheet I found it really easy to animate the twisting of the handle and the balls mixing at the same time. I used the graph’s handles to make the twisting motion a bit more natural and I think it’s really effective.
Now I had to animate the gumballs coming out of the machine. This should’ve been really straight forward but instead, I had some issues. Firstly, the gumballs were going upwards instead of downwards. I think this is because they had some kind of invisible mesh that was getting caught on the insides of the machine because I made them a tiny bit smaller and it solved the problem.
My next problem was that they froze after a few seconds each time. This was because there was a setting that stopped them moving once they had lost their initial velocity. Once I found this setting they moved properly.
The last thing to do was to animate the flap to let them out. I found out that when you scrub through the animation instead of playing it normally, the software still simulates everything live, so if I scrubbed through really quickly, the balls would not fall out and would get caught by the flap.
This final video is me creating the right set up, tweaking things like the lighting, the materials, and creating an infinite background (which really needs some improvement).
Overall I am really proud of this piece. This is the first time I’ve created a whole piece including animation without using a tutorial to show me the techniques. The only tutorials I used were for troubleshooting, so it feels great that essentially, this is all me.
The render isn’t the best quality, it took over 8 hours on my computer, so when I render it for my final piece I will render it on the fast university computers with higher samples so that the quality is better. I also struggled with lighting the gumballs inside the machine. It was hard to get a good amount of ambient occlusion whilst still being able to actually see their colours, so maybe I need to play around with some lights and the thickness of the glass.
After rendering I wanted to just experiment with some fun lighting colours to see if I could’ve created a more dramatic effect.
I especially like having the main light as one colour and having the shadow filling light as a darker bluer tone, I think it makes it look a bit like night time.
Finally, I did one last render of the gumballs close up, just to see if I could see why they were so dark. I’m still not sure how to fix it, but this render looks nice so I put it here anyway.
Jennie Hawkes 