Toothpaste and brush… Sounds boring, eh? It did to me from the beginning but as I continued to model my entry I realized it was more complex than it seemed. I had to figure out the right technique to accomplish modeling a few items we all take for granted everyday.
The toothpaste tube was fairly simple for me but required some trial and error. I started out with a circle about the diameter of a tube of toothpaste at the neck. I then extruded it about an inch with the push/pull tool. Then I used the scale tool while holding down Ctrl to resize the resulting end of the extruded circle to make it slightly wider on the green axis and slightly narrower on the red axis. I repeated the steps on the resulting ovals until I had the basic shape. I then created some small rectangular boxes in a row, positioned them to overlap into the narrow end of the tube. I selected the face of the tube and intersected by selection to give the crimp effect at the end of the tube and erased the boxes and the resulting clipped faces on the tube. The label was a matter of creating the elements floating over the top of the tube and extruding them into the face of the tube and intersecting by context on the face to create the geometry. There were many additional steps involved that would take too much time to explain.
The toothbrush was simpler and involved the follow me tool on curves I created and using the same technique I used in the Luxury Motor Yacht challenge to create the yacht hull. For the neck and head of the brush I had to use the follow me tool in segments, then erase ends of those segments and manually recreate the ends and stitch them together with the line tool. All that might not had to to be done had I planned it out better but when you have to stop on the edge of a curve with the follow me tool, the ending face is not at right angles to the extrude path which is frustrating. The handle was easier than the neck. I modeled that by creating circles of varying diameter on a curved edge I created as a guide. I then stitched each circle together to create faces. I learned that technique by reading or watching a tutorial for modeling a banana somewhere. The grip was created by intersecting some extruded ovals into the handle and colored in the bristles were not too hard; they were just slightly rounded tubes rotated outward from each other to give them a slight flair. They were copied and pasted, then grouped. The grouped bristles were then copied and pasted into the layout I chose.
There were many times where I had to resize the model 10x and intersect items and reduce the model by 0.1 to overcome a glitch in SketchUP that creates missing faces when they were too small.
Creating the Kerkythea rendering was frustrating only when trying to make the bristles look transparent and shiny. The rendering process took 5 hours and I had to cancel it when it was taking too long to anti-alias the rendering. Only this morning I was able to get it done. I unchecked specular sampling for the bristles materials and it rendered in 5 minutes! D’oh! The 2250 individual bristles caused too much lag with the specular sampling. It would have been quicker to use Pixar’s rendering farm but I don’t have access to that, I’m just a hobbyist, not George Lucas.
Click here to see my entry. Look below for an image gallery:
Update: I won the challenge!
