Computer Science 3710 - Computer Graphics Project

By: Krysti Bouttell-Bonnar

I chose to model a candlestick I got from my grandmother. As you can
see below the candlestick is a fairly simple design: gold with floral
print engraving. I chose to model this as the shape was relatively
basic, but due to the curved nature throughout the design I figured it
would still be challenging as I had never previously used Blender.

I built my model from the bottom up. I started with a cylinder. By
decreasing the depth and increasing the radius I was able to create the
base. Using a combination of extrude and push/pull operations I slowly
increased the height of the candlestick. Progress was quite slow due to
the gradual curves of the candlestick. I wanted to maintain control over
the increasing radius of the candlestick, thus each extrude was an
incredibly small increment. The same is true about the push/pull
operation: I wanted to try and keep the curvature as natural feeling as
possible so there are a lot of pull operations happening of only one unit.

One of the biggest challenges I had working on this project was that in
order to build the model I had to be extremely zoomed into the object
which caused a few scaling issues where an extrude looked large enough but
once zoomed out to see the whole model it was clear it was too small. In
most cases this became an issue when trying to create the curves as it was
not until quite a few additions later that I noticed the model was widening
too quickly and by then I wasn't able to go back and fix it as I would have
liked.

Once the model was complete I really wanted to try and add a texture. I
found a metal texture (see below link) that was somewhat similar to the
original, although it was silver as opposed to gold. When adding the
material and texture I noticed that when rendered the texture was being
applied to the base properly however when it came to the rest of the
candlestick it was applying the texture to the inside of the candlestick. I
double checked my face normals, edge normals and vertex normals and they
were all pointing in the right direction. So I did a bit of searching and
came upon a website that covered UV unwrapping. I tried to UV unwrap my
model to get greater control over the texturing. UV unwrapping turned out
pretty interesting yet I still could not get the texture to be on the right
side. So I moved onto creating a candle figuring if I could make a candle
and texture it appropriately I might discover an error in my candlestick
texturing, as the candlestick was essentially a cylinder. I found a texture
online (see below link) and preceded to texture my candle. Again however I
noticed that the top and bottom were being textured appropriately however
the side was black and the inside of the cylinder was being textured. At
this point I figured I was not going to be able to figure out why it was
texturing wrong so I added a plane and managed to texture it to look like
wood (see link below) as if the candlestick was sitting on a table.

http://opengameart.org/node/7583 - snow(candle)

http://www.texturemate.com/content/free-metal-texture-27-02-2013-0020 - metal

http://opengameart.org/node/8718 - wood